We’re Verizon customers and have been holding off on getting any smartphone for a variety of reasons, but that iPhone announcement is mighty tempting.
Reasons not to: new technology hasn’t been through the shakedown phase, won’t use the latest networking (it’s not 4G compatible)…
Reasons to: it’s an IPHONE. We already use iPod Touches as PDAs, this would get free up pocket/purse space by letting us use only one device and it would obviously be quite easy to switch over. We’ve already bought a bunch of apps (that we’d have to replace if we got an Android smartphone). The kids would be thrilled to get our cast-off iPods.
We won’t be the first kids on the block to get them regardless, but sometime this year, smartphones are very likely in our future.
It’s actually not any new technology as far as I can tell. Just CDMA instead of GSM. Nothing groundbreaking or innvative about the Verizon iPhone 4. Same as AT&T just on a difference carrier.
Hotspot capability with no simultaneous voice and data is a joke. No simultaneous voice and data is a joke period. Still, I hope the whiners jump ship, so the AT&T bashing will stop.
Wouldn’t the same be true of any Verizon phone though?
I agree, it’ll be interesting to see what the jailbreakers do with this one.
Verizon’s notorious for loading their smartphones with crapware. And I really don’t see the point in getting anything that’s a step back from their best network anyway. So while the idea is obviously very intriguing, we won’t be in a hurry.
I’m actually ditching mine, come Feb 17 - I’ll still use it as an iTouch, but I’ve discovered that I really dislike being locked into a contract. My current contract is up then, and I"m looking at non-contract plans. Virgin Mobile is most appealing right now.
If I were to consider it, I’d probably wait for an LTE iPhone, which unfortunately, probably isn’t going to arrive until 2012. I noted that they said something in the conference about the LTE chipset forcing compromises on the design that they didn’t like. That would tend to rule out an LTE phone in June when the usual new iPhone model comes out.
Yup, exactly this. There is no new technology in the Verizon iPhone that hasn’t been on the AT&T iPhone 4 – except that it operates on a CDMA platform. If I was going to leave AT&T (I’m not), I wouldn’t do it until an LTE iPhone is introduced.
My girlfriend is planning on getting an Verizon iPhone, both because she’s ready to upgrade from her iPhone 3G and because she’s already been thinking about switching to Verizon from AT&T when her contract is up in March.
As for me, while I may consider going to Verizon when my AT&T contract is up in a year and a half or so, you’ll have to pry my BlackBerry from my cold, dead hands.
Yes, but I also want to drop my payments: $75 a month is way too much out of my budget. If I go to Virgin Mobile, the $25/month plan will work very well for me.
Some CDMA phones also have GSM capability (and SIMs). These are usually marketed as ‘world’ or ‘global’ phones. Here are Verizon’s.
In the days when Bell was CDMA only in Canada, even if you didn’t have a world phone, you could still get a Bell SIM for use in GSM phones outside the country.
FYI, there isn’t going to be any Verizon ‘bloatware’ on their iPhone. None. Software wise, it’s identical to the AT&T one, except that it has the added wifi hotspot feature.
As for not being able to use data and voice at the same time…is that really a big problem? I have a Sprint Android phone and if I’m using data and get a phone call, it pauses the data to tell me (and unless I’m actively downloading a video, it’s unlikely to actually pause anything,) and I can answer it or let it go to voicemail and keep using data. I think that when the hotspot is on, it will just automatically go to voicemail.
But no, I’m certainly not getting one. I left AT&T to go to Sprint in September for a sweet-ass Android phone, leaving my AT&T contract early, no less, because of how much I came to hate my iPhone. I did like it when I first got it, but it slowly got more and more problems, and I didn’t like how Apple was basically like “oh, you have an iPhone that isn’t the most current? Yeah, we don’t really care about you…here’s a token software upgrade but FYI it will make your phone slow as death.”
I’m only aware of the iPhone 4 ever being available in 16 or 32 gig.
I have a 16 GB 3GS with ~2000 songs, a few Kindle books, misc photos and a bunch of apps, and still 2.6 gigs of space left. Of course, video would eat up any space in no time.
Someday I’d like to try a Droid. I like my iPhone and all (actually never been more pleased with a cell phone) but there are some quirks that annoy me.