(image courtesy of anandtech.com)
Well it finally happened.
This morning, Verizon held a press event in New York City announcing the imminent availability of the iPhone 4 on its network on February 10th. As some predicted, Steve Jobs was not on hand to help make the announcement, although Big Red did land a pretty big fish in getting Tim Cook, COO of Apple, to make an appearance.
Here’s what you need to know about the Verizon iPhone:
- It still runs on 3G – All that excitement about Verizon’s new 4G LTE network from last month won’t apply to the first iPhone on the network.
- It has a new Mobile Hotspot feature – You can connect up to 5 devices to your iPhone via WiFi or bluetooth/usb and share internet access among them.
- You can’t use the internet while on a voice call – This is a limitation that all Verizon CDMA phones have and the Verizon iPhone 4 won’t change that.
- Limited international roaming – The Verizon iPhone 4 has no SIM card slot, which means you can’t use it in most of Europe or anywhere else with GSM-dominated networks.
- There are slight changes to button placement from the AT&T iPhone 4 – Some accessories (including the Apple bumper) won’t fit on the Verizon iPhone.
- “Death Gripping” the antenna still causes reception to drop – Even though there is an additional antenna strip, you can still make the signal strength on the Verizon iPhone 4 attenuate by holding it a certain way. It’s still not a big deal, especially if you use a case with your phone.
- Phone Pricing is the same as AT&T – $199.99 for the 16GB and $299.99 for the 32GB with a 2 year contract. You can buy a contract-less phone for full retail price, though.
- No preloaded Verizon-branded software – The Verizon iPhone 4 will be completely devoid of any Big Red branding on the device or bloatware pre-installed on the phone.
- No early upgrade option for existing customers – If you aren’t eligible to upgrade, tough turkey, my friend. You’ll have to pay full price if you want the iPhone 4 on Verizon.
- No data plan pricing has been announced yet – It’s a curious move and I wonder if it’s to let all the good vibes from the phone announcement permeate before some not-so-good news on the pricing plans.
Current Verizon customers can pre-order the phone “on or around Feburary 3rd” on Verizonwiress.com. Everyone else will have to go to either a Verizon or Apple store on launch day, February 10th. We imagine that there will be a pretty big line, so good luck to you if you need a phone on launch day.
If you want to read more about the actual device, Engadget has a hands on video with the Verizon iPhone 4 while Anandtech has some preliminary benchmarks on signal strength and webpage load times. (We’ll have to give you a caveat that it’s quite possible Verizon picked the location that they did for the press event specifically to show off their network strength compared to AT&T’s. It wouldn’t surprise us in the least if they installed a local femtocell to boost their service quality for demonstration purposes.) Finally, Verizon has a FAQ setup to answer some of the more logistical questions if you are serious about taking the plunge.
Basically, other than the mobile hotspot feature, it’s the exact same iPhone 4 that’s on AT&T right now. You do lost a couple of features like talking while internet surfing and the international roaming capability, but we imagine most people would gladly trade those things to get more reliable service.
Personally, I’m tempted to jump ship because of AT&T’s service, but since I’m barely 6 months into my current iPhone 4 contract, I’d rather wait for an upcoming revision of the device to really consider switching over. I can’t help this nagging feeling that switching over now might be like that traffic scene in the movie Office Space where switching networks just puts me in another clogged lane.
But, man, can you imagine a LTE enabled iPhone 5 on the Verizon network with Mobile Hotspot support? Talk about mobile gadget nirvana.
