Verizon iPhone: everything you need to know
Ah, the Verizon iPhone. In our bizarre careers as tech journalists, if there's one question we've heard more than “When is Verizon getting the iPhone?” we can't think of it. Also, outside the original rumors for the iPhone and iPad …
Context & Ripple Effects
The longest-running question in American tech journalism appears headed for an answer: the Wall Street Journal reports a person familiar with the matter says Verizon will announce the iPhone at a Tuesday event in New York, with BGR pegging a February 3 launch date. The buildup spans over a year of coverage — Business Week reported Verizon preparing for the iPhone back in December 2009, and by April 2010 the carrier's CEO had told Apple of its interest directly.
The strongest tell came in October, when TechCrunch argued that the Verizon iPad bundle — whose MiFi hotspot supporting five devices was confirmed hardware — was a dress rehearsal for the phone itself. Daring Fireball's read on why next week's event is hosted by Verizon rather than Apple suggests the framing matters as much as the product: this is a carrier story first.
First-order effects
- Verizon's roughly 90-million-subscriber base gets access to the iPhone for the first time, ending AT&T's exclusive hold on the device in the US.
- The announcement forces a choice on every Verizon smartphone customer weighing an upgrade — and on Android handset makers like Samsung, which per unconfirmed reports Verizon is already countering with a $499 Galaxy Tab price cut and $60 in bundled movie rentals.
Second-order effects
- AT&T, losing its differentiating exclusive, must compete on network quality and pricing rather than device availability — likely accelerating its own Android lineup and retention offers.
- Apple gains a second US distribution channel, shifting its carrier negotiations from scarcity leverage to volume economics, with every remaining exclusive-market carrier worldwide watching the template.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US smartphone competition reorganizes around carrier-versus-carrier service bundles rather than who carries which flagship device — the exclusivity era giving way to a two-network arms race for the same marquee hardware.
- A successful CDMA iPhone would pressure Apple toward a genuinely world-phone architecture, reducing the engineering cost of multi-carrier launches everywhere else.
The trend: Smartphone distribution in the US is moving from single-carrier exclusives as a moat to multi-carrier availability as table stakes, with carriers competing on network and bundling instead.