Verizon iPhone Rumored For Early Next Year 251
Many readers are submitting coverage from around the Net, all based on a Bloomberg piece quoting two anonymous sources who insist that Verizon Wireless will offer a CDMA iPhone in January 2011. No one at Verizon or Apple would confirm, of course, and no one at AT&T would comment. "The iPhone, which has been the sole domain of rival AT&T in the US since June 2007, will give Verizon a boost in its competition for smartphone customers, UBS AG analyst John Hodulik said in an interview. Verizon customers, who numbered 92.8 million at the end of the first quarter, may buy 3 million iPhones a quarter, he estimates. ... 'Apple is going to dramatically increase the number of devices it sells in the US when exclusivity at AT&T ends,' said Hodulik. ... 'It's hard to ignore the quality issues that AT&T has faced.'"
Can we shut up about this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose I am an Apple "fanboy" and I like hearing interesting Apple news as much as the next guy, but there is no news here.
Many with family plans on Verizon are waiting ... (Score:4, Insightful)
--
Perpenso Calc [perpenso.com] for iPhone, scientific and hex calculator, RPN, fractions, complex numbers, 64/32-bit modes, signed/unsigned modes, IEEE FP encode/decode, UTF-8, RGB
Steve would never do this... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would certainly calm fears at AT&T about subscriber loss...
Too bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, Apple should have gone multi-carrier from the 3G(S) onwards and probably from the first iPhone... But, this is Apple, after all, AT&T's terrible network is just part of the experience! Now you can be complaining about it like the masses!
small impact, android will trump (Score:4, Insightful)
this will have less of an impact for verizon than people might think. in a year, android will be even more entrenched in their existing user base. for new users, there will be new android offerings that out-gear the iphone 4.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can we shut up about this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Blame Verizon (Score:5, Insightful)
> 'It's hard to ignore the quality issues that AT&T has faced.'"
Even harder to ignore that Verizon's closed network only runs Verizon phones.
If Verizon is building LTE then that can run iPhone 4G. Can't see a CDMA iPhone at this late stage. It's been end-of-lifed for quite some time. An iPhone 4G launch on Verizon is an event. Verizon and AT&T competing for iPhone users with the same handsets is an event.
different systems (Score:5, Insightful)
nothing that will work on the ATT network will work on Verizon. different chipsets, different modulation, different cell-skip algorithms.
so Apple would have to whip up two different phones altogether. they could keep the screen and maybe some of the case parts, but nothing else. they don't do that.
we are entering a new era, in which the 4G systems are going to be more similar than different. now, it makes sense for Apple to span multiple 4G systems, as you just fork the software left or right at boot, and twiddle some tables. note the rumored verIphone will only work in the 4G realm, which will be 1/5 of the network or so in January, but the whole thing by the 2012/2013 boundary.
Re:different systems (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:small impact, android will trump (Score:5, Insightful)
And for those of us not attempting to take professional photography with our cell phones, and those who don't feel the "magic" of pixel density, and those who want to make video calls while not connected to Wifi, and those who don't have vegetarian-starved thin fingers with which to manipulate a tiny (but immaculately crisp, no doubt) onscreen keyboard, and those who want to use, and wirelessly share, a 7-10 Mbps data connection, all while paying less per month - there's the EVO 4G.
Re:different systems (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but its Apple, look at Motorola which pretty much shipped 4 versions of the Razor phone for each of the major carriers, just add some drivers to iOS and divide manufacturing between CDMA and GSM iPhones, for a company as large as Apple, its not too huge of a feat. For a tiny community driven company, yes, for a major hardware vendor like Apple? Its easy.
Why do something as easy as ship 4 different phones for the 4 major US carriers, when they can do something as complicated as ship one phone that works with at least one provider in just about every place on earth.
Where's the damn SEC? (Score:2, Insightful)
Only Madoff could run a game as long as Verizon is.
Re:small impact, android will trump (Score:3, Insightful)
HTC Droid Incredible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaDE941PzQk [youtube.com]
Nexus One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2g5J4qPp54 [youtube.com]
Nokia E71: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi1gHDa7-X0 [youtube.com]
Nokia 6230: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_RP7Fn1w8Q [youtube.com]
Nokia 6720: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7t75Uo6qQ [youtube.com]
Basically, any phone that has an integrated antenna will have diminished signal when you hold them from the bottom instead of how almost everyone in the civilized world holds a cellphone when making a call. Take note of the Verizon phone in the mix.
Re:AT&T....can you fear me now? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yup. That's why when the iPhone 4G launched they allowed anyone to sign up for one, even if they weren't near the end of their contract. Now AT&T has locked in everyone who was an Apple fanboy or early adopter, and probably the majority of iPhone upgraders. When (if) it hits Verizon in January the only people who will be interested are the (relatively) few people who wanted an iPhone but who didn't want to leave Verizon for AT&T AND who didn't already shell out for a Droid X, Droid 2, or whatever Droid device launches this fall that includes everything the iPhone 4 has.
What would be interesting though is if the Verizon iPhone 4 were an LTE handset. Verizon has been rolling out LTE but has said that they won't launch a handset until 2011. An LTE iPhone launch would be a real head-turner, providing the simultaneous voice and data capability that AT&T likes to tout along with 4G bandwidth.
Re:Can we shut up about this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh, Exclusive Deal (And GSM)? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are also phones that simultaneously do GSM and CDMA. My BlackBerry Tour works on Verizon's network, but can also roam onto just about any GSM network worldwide (and even has a Verizon SIM card, which is a bit of an oddity I suppose)
The phone's a piece of shit otherwise, but it can indeed hop onto both networks, (and make incomprehensibly noisy phone calls, and achieve miserable speeds for its limited selection of worthless apps during its incredibly short battery life).
That's my work phone. My personal phone is a Droid Incredible, which is a fantastic piece of hardware with some great software underneath it. RIM is going to tank once another company figures out how to capture the "enterprise" market. Their products are godawful.
Re:small impact, android will trump (Score:1, Insightful)
Indeed there is.
And you're a teeny tiny portion of the market.
*pats poster on head*
Re:small impact, android will trump (Score:3, Insightful)
We know that all phones will have this issue to some extent--it is an inescapable consequence of the physics of RF and antennas. But it will not be a problem for some people, because it will also depend upon their individual electrical properties. Whether the frequency of such problems is any greater for the iPhone than for other phones remains to be seen. For example, Ars Technica reported "We were able to reproduce this problem consistently once we learned the proper technique for "cupping" the phone—before watching a video how to do this, several of us on staff were unable to just figure out on our own how to make this happen...During our testing, this did not seem to affect our actual phone calls outside of when we were explicitly trying to degrade the signal." [arstechnica.com].