Verizon to finally get iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Verizon to finally get iPhone

online.wsj.com

87 pointsstrandev86 comments

This carrier exclusivity thing on the US amuses me.

In the end, consumers are the ones hurt, 'cause it limits the available choices.

Here in Brazil we have regulatory agencies that set up rules against that kind of thing. SIM locking by carriers is also illegal here. (Not actually illegal, but they're legally required to unlock the phones for you without additional cost)

I'm pretty sure a lot of other countries have similar rules, or am I wrong?

I agree. It's a completely anticompetitive practice and should be regulated.

depends on if you believe in free markets I guess. the market has seemed to resolved this situation - iPhone is going multi-carrier in the US

Hong Kong and Singapore has similar rules by their authorities. In one way you can say US prefers to practice free market. Or you can say US government does not care about their citizens. Or US government treats their corporations better than people.

Hopefully this time it is real - not because I am going to buy one but because the "analysts" can finally shut up and end their endless hype/crusade of Verizon iPhone.

Out of curiosity, does anyone seriously know who these "analysts" are and what their job actually entails?

I've wondered about the same. Here is the public info about one such analyst Gene Munster - http://www.piperjaffray.com/1col.aspx?id=7&analystid=131 . Some choice bits - "specializing in Internet" , "holds a bachelor's degree in financial management and new venture strategies from the University of St. Thomas" "coverage includes Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Baidu, and MercadoLibre" . Sounds like a good gig to me!

Someone should compile information about these tech analysts, their educational qualifications, their official job details (organizations they work for, job duties they perform over a typical year, their goals and objectives etc.), the data they work off of, their predictions from 2008 onwards, hit/miss ratio, stock price fluctuations attributable to their predictions and any other interesting tidbits.

May be something sinister will come out of it or may be not - but it will still be interesting to look at.

Small world. I specialize in internet, too.

Every quarter the publicly-traded tech companies hold earnings calls. After the company gives its spiel, it allows the analysts to ask questions. These calls are open to the public, and I suggest you listen in on one for a company you know well; the questions you hear will tell you pretty much all you need to know about these analysts.

Care to describe more?

Too little too late.

I just got off a call with my wife (SV to the Bay Bridge, iPhone to iPhone) and it only dropped 4 times.

I just relocated to my number to SV a couple of months ago and I only had to call 4 times to get all the features back to what they were. Plus I got over being mad about having no message at all for callers to my old number.

Also, I really don't mind calling AT&T every couple of months to find out why that charge was on my freakishly high bill. I love the way all the call center people are trained to take an extra 15-30 seconds per call expressing AT&T's caring attitude. That script doesn't need to be shortened at all.

I never wonder if an unemployed poor person on a pay-as-you-go plan has lower costs and fewer customer service problems. And I got over the shock of the difference between the high margin Apple experience and the high margin AT&T experience. Really, I have.

Nope. AT&T has nothing to worry about.

AT&T's reception problems seem to be mostly concentrated in a few large cities -- most notably NY and SV/San Fransisco.

I'm a longtime AT&T customer and recent iPhone owner. I've lived in Milwaukee and Phoenix, and their reception is on par with the other carriers in those cities. NY and SV are, in my opinion, the last places you'd want poor service (because it will be discussed nationwide), but I don't think that their reception is so terrible generally nationwide.

I agree that their customer service is pretty lackluster -- then again, I've heard plenty of Verizon customer service horror stories.

(Please chime if you're in another city and have unusual reception woes, my limited experience is not necessarily representative)

North Scottsdale was spotty when I lived their two years ago. Anything near the McDowell's is likely to drop calls or have no reception at all on AT&T, while Verizon was fine. I actually had no problem with AT&T (Cingular at the time), many years before, but it seems as data phones became more popular, AT&T's network quality dropped.

I've since moved to Seattle, and AT&T is atrocious. There is hardly a day where calls don't drop and I find myself on Edge in the middle of the city far too often.

This coincides with my experiences: travelling to NY or SF turns my iPhone into an iPod touch. However, it works flawlessly in the very flat region of Virginia where I live.

It's my understanding that GSM is more prone to geographic disruption, hills in SF and buildings in NYC, than CDMA.

I have AT&T/iPhone 3GS and live in SV and my service sucks. After I moved here though I asked some other coworkers what they thought about Verizon/T-Mobile and I mostly got the feeling that everybody sucks, and Verizon is maybe marginally better, but the people I know with Verizon phones aren't really happy with their service either.

Is Verizon any better in that respect? I remember Verizon getting slammed for mysterious data charges and famously it took them years to sort out their FIOS billing system. I don't think of Verizon as a company with a reputation for great customer support. I would actually consider switching to Verizon simply because AT&T can't seem to figure out how to make my auto pay work correctly. It fails every month. I wait for them to call and they assure me it will work next time and of course it doesn't. The last AT&T rep I talked to about this actually said "it probably won't work" which in a strange way was a satisfying answer to me. Better than the drone-like confidence in "THE SYSTEM" most of these support departments rely on.

Verizon Wireless and Verizon Communications (FIOS, landline, etc) are two very different entities. Most of the horror stories you (or at least _I_) hear are about Verizon Communications.

Verizon Wireless actually gives their CSRs a _lot_ of authority to take care the customer on the phone. While any company with the number of customer interactions that VZW has will generate some horror stories, on the whole, I think VZW is one of the better big companies out there when it comes to support.

Except that VZW's number one priority when they get a call is to upsell.

My friend took a job their for a bit after losing his previous job as a claims adjuster and absolutely hated it. The managers would listen in on calls and if you didn't try to upsell at least once, you'd get written up.

Looks like all the "groundless" speculation was dead on. A Verizon iPhone has been predicted for a long time, and we knew that there was an exclusivity contract with ATT whose term had to be met, but the claims of vapor have gone up in a puff of smoke.

I know of several people who wanted iPhones but refused to give up Verizon's cell network for ATT. The biggest gap in cell network satisfaction--based on the word of mouth in my circles--is between those two. Now that this is happening, iPhone is sure to maintain a permanently substantial market share down the line; not as high unit sales as Android devices, but more than enough to finance continued development of what I consider to be the best value for a phone on the market, which is all I care about.

> the claims of vapor have gone up in a puff of smoke.

Really? Sure, it's finally happened, but people have been predicting a Verizon iPhone "next week / month / quarter" for, literally, years. It was practically inevitable, seeing as Apple has no ideological qualms with multiple distributers in other countries.

If I recall correctly, Verizon was Apple's first choice for US carrier, but refused to play ball with Apple's (admittedly unprecedented) demands.

Speculation has hardly been groundless. Apple had an exclusivity contract with AT&T for some time, it was obvious that they'd branch out to other carriers after they were free from that restriction, and Verizon is the most logical choice due to their coverage, infrastructure, and existing user base.

Granted, the breathless speculation without any shred of firm evidence about a Verizon iPhone on X date has been silly and annoying, but the fact that there would be a Verizon iPhone eventually has always been an incredibly logical step.

It wasn't speculation. It's been worked on for at least a couple years. Asian manufacturers leaked info way back in last winter. It's been in the works a long time.

It was almost released this last summer but there were network capacity concerns and radio problems.

There are different prototypes with different & hybrid radios but I'm not sure which is going to show up Tuesday, but I'd wager it's CDMA only.

If it doesn't actually happen on Tuesday, I will refuse to get my hopes up ever again.

There are times when I seriously get confused, did I buy an iPod Touch or an iPhone?

Calls between me and other iPhoners just end up in a sometimes hilarious tennis match of dropped calls and callbacks.

No LTE, the infamous metal strip will be almost complete flush with glass top & bottom, metal strip will only be segmented once, instead of 3 times, mostly resembles an iPhone 4 otherwise. Talk & data simultaneously. No Vzw bloat on board. iOS 4.3.x (just changes for cdma).

If you're considering downvoting this, wait until Tuesday to do so :)

Talk and data at the same time isn't technologically possible on cdma. How do you figure they'll pull it off?

http://pocketnow.com/tech-news/simultaneous-voice-data-comin...

Ahhhh. I had missed that article last year. Thanks!

Google SV-DO.

Is it GSM+CDMA or CDMA only?

I don't know the answer to that. Sorry.

"If you're considering downvoting this, wait until Tuesdays to do so :)"

I'll take my chances ;)

If true. I wonder about the possibility of No Vzw bloat on board, how will that effect the sales of android, will the Iphone cost more as a "Premium" clean phone?

Come on, it's a cell phone carrier. There's only one possible answer to the "will XYZ cost more..." question: yes.

Verizon is pretty clever. They'll probably just create an iPhone Plan that is 50 cents more a month and over 2 years you've paid for the privilege of not having bloatware forced on you. I don't think they would dare charge more than AT&T for the hardware itself since consumers are so fixated on the sticker price and easily misled on the longer term costs of the contract they're signing. I always figured the incredibly pricey cases & accessories are a big factor here too. If you show up, buy an iPhone, and walk out with a $30-$40 case they've probably made more money off you than VZW bloat would have.

Apparently, the infamous metal strip won't be flush with the glass, anymore. It'll be the same form factor as the iPhone 4.

I am absurdly excited about this, mostly because I am in hate with my Droid.

However, the gmail and contacts integration on Droid is top notch. Am I going to be less happy on iphone?

gmail on iphone sucks - because of apple

http://bugreporter.apple.com/

Well, considering most of the cloud integration goodness on iPhone is only possible with Google products, I don't think you can complain too much. iPhone is just as Google-dependent for the full experience as is Android. I will say that Google needs to develop a G-Mail app on par with its Android equivalent for iOS, but using the default mail client with IMAP works just fine in reality; it is the same basic experience as any other third party client.

Apple doesn't allow 3rd party mail clients.

I sync my iPhone contacts with my Gmail account using Google's Exchange ActiveSync.

http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/

edit: no limit on accounts

Since 4.0 you can have multiple Exchange accounts.

Gmail and contacts syncing works great on iPhone. It uses Exchange to do all of the syncing, and it's quite fast. I had to get my phone exchanged, and all of my contacts and emails were synched in a few minutes after I got the new phone. Not sure what the other comments are talking about, you can use multiple Exchange accounts on iOS.

You're really limiting yourself not using a just even slightly newer phone. CM6 or even CM7 on the Droid Inc is waaaay faster than on my D1.

It will be interesting to see what this does to Verizon's Droid pricing. If Verizon adopts similar plans to AT&T with a cheap, limited, data add-on, a Verizon iPhone could be just as big a boost to Android.

Device specs for the Verizon iPhone 4 can be found here:

http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=2548&c=verizon...

EDIT: Just so I can understand what I've done wrong, would one of the down-voters please explain why the specs leaked in March/April last year are not relevant? Thanks!

Since it claims the phone will be running 4.0.2, I'd say these are a little more speculation than fact.

Heck, you always need take leaked specs with a grain of salt, if not a whole shaker of salt, a lime, and a shot of tequila. I think your down-vote was a bit reactionary.

Those leaked specs have been on the pdadb for at least 9 months even though the device was only just officially announced during CES this week. I think the verizon iphone specs have been up there since shortly before (March 2010) the release of the iPhone 4 (June 2010), hence the iOS version it was claimed to be running (during the end of development/prototyping). The first "preview" of iOS 4.x was in April 2010.

Similar was true for Droid2 and Droid2-Global specs being available 9-12 months prior to device releases/announcements. In both those cases, the leaked specs matched up very well with the eventually released products.

Even when a device is "finished" (hardware engineering-wise) the lead times for manufacturing ramp-up and marketing build-up can be many months.

EDIT: Added rough dates to leak and iOS releases

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history

I'm currently inside the 30 day window return as a brand new iPhone/AT&T customer; I wonder if any minor differences in this phone or in Verizon's service (I really haven't had any problems with AT&T so far in the NYC area, I make very few voice calls) would be impetus enough to switch.

Anyone care to speculate where the smart money might be on choosing AT&T or Verizon for service?

If you read Consumer Reports, they recently had a large survey, and AT&T came in last in pretty much every single market, and Verizon was in first in most of them.

Anecdotally, in NYC, the voice reliability on AT&T was terrible for me - every other call would drop within the first five minutes, many within the first two. I never had issues with my old verizon phone, I could count the number of dropped calls with one hand.

re: getting the Verizon iPhone:

  Reminder: date of product announcement != ship date

Important point. Current rumors [1] peg the ship date as the first week of February, which is still a month off.

[1] http://www.bgr.com/2011/01/07/verizon-iphone-launch-looks-se...

Ship date is likely very soon, Apple didn't tell their retail employees they couldn't take vacations this month for nothing.

One thing to consider is AT&T may offer some really good deals to counter the VZ launch. If you can live without the iPhone for 30 days you might end up with a much better package over 2 years or a heavily discounted price on the hardware. I think it's probably worth the wait. I doubt VZ will be offering any good deals just because they have a decent amount of pent up demand for the iPhone. Why discount something you know people will pay full price for?

Fingers crossed that T-mobile won't be too far behind. I really love my T-mobile plan.

I assure you that your T-Mobile plan will not be available for use with a T-Mobile iPhone.

Whatever it ends up being, I'm sure it'll be a better deal than ATT/V.

Pricing game theory suggests that T-Mobile should undercut AT&T by a small margin at most.

It depends on what you mean by "not available for use." Any standard T-mobile plan that includes data (even the $5 T-Zones plan) will work with the iPhone. The only problem is that it's Edge-only.

True, you can possibly rig it up with an unlocked AT&T or other non-T-Mobile contract bound phone.

What I do with my iPhone 3G. But as parent said data is only on EDGE.

People have been running iPhones on T-Mobile since 2007. The reason this is so big is because the iPhone currently doesn't support CDMA.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you jailbreak your iPhone and use it on T-Mobile's network you will only be able to use the EDGE/2G network as the iPhone's 3G radio uses different frequencies than T-Mobile's 3G network.

Makes the choice seem a little backwards then doesn't it?

Exactly. That's why I'd rather use Android over iPhone.

I'm hoping for one that uses their HSPA+ technology that gives 42 mbp/s of blazing speed.

You're correct, except that it is "unlocking" that allows you to use an AT&T iPhone on another carrier. "Jailbreaking" is completely different - it simply allows you to install unsigned software.

One must jailbreak their iPhone before it can be unlocked, because you need to run special, unsigned software to unlock it.

The WSJ has had a particularly good record on Apple announcements shortly before they happen (the iPad announcement, the case program in response to antennagate), so I think we can be pretty confident about this.

This is total speculation; back in Sept. I was thinking about the white iPhone 4 and how it was delayed. I can see it only being available on Verizon (for a limited time) followed by specific colors for different carries, much like KitchenAid does for their blenders.

I would be surprised if Sprint and T-Mobile didn't have the iPhone within the year (if Verizon does indeed get it soon)

I'm crossing my fingers on T-Mobile. I gave my mom a jailbroken iPhone 3G a few months ago, after she returned her third consecutive T-Mobile feature phone in as many weeks.

She's never been happier with a phone ('so easy to use,' 'doesn't make me feel like an idiot,' 'so many capabilities'), and I'd love to get her onto an up-to-date one with 3G data capabilities.

I'd just tell her to move onto AT&T but, in my experience, their network in the Twin Cities is even worse than San Francisco's.

Really? I've never once had an issue with my iPhone 4 and AT&T anywhere in the Twin Cities. I have perfect 3G coverage pretty much everywhere I go.

I've had spotty reception trouble around Minneapolis, but Uptown has always been the worst. For instance, I usually can only get a single bar of reception inside Spyhouse on 25th and Hennepin on my iPhone 4, and 2 outside if I'm lucky.

Also, I should mention that this experience was from Summer 2010. Maybe there were some issues with ATT's network in July, or maybe they've been bringing a lot more capacity online over the past few months.

T-Mobile in the Twin Cities seems to have been going down hill (brother has it). The company is cool, but their service is poor. His wife's iPhone is doing great (Woodbury / St. Paul area). Also, one or more cell companies had towers on the old 35w bridge before it fell down and I seem to remember an article talking about problems arfterwords. T-mobile used to work fine down I94, but now much west of St. cloud is dead.

// sorry about above, deleted comment because I saw this thread

This is certainly going to increase some iPhone marketshare in my area where AT&T has essentially no service. I know some people already that have iPhones and an additional cheap phone from Verizon or somebody to be able to reliably communicate.

is this why at&t dropped the iphone 3gs to $50 today?

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/atandt-selling-iphone-3gs...

Yes.

I'd say no, totally unrelated, since:

a) it wasn't today b) that phone is now dated and was only $99 before; $50 less isn't a big deal considering that the real price includes a 2-yr contract

Yes, but smart phone buyers are going to enter a contract regardless. The iPhone contract is no more expensive than competing smart phones' contracts. When carriers compete on price, they're almost always competing on the price of the device itself.

I mean, really, did anyone expect the iPhone to drop from $499 to $49 in three years?!

$50 for the 3gs doesn't seem like a big deal when some carriers provide the iphone 4 for free:

http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/iphone_en/price_plan/value_program/

And now the wait begins for iPhone to come to Sprint. I think I'm safe buying a Galaxy S next month as I doubt it'll happen within the next 2 years.

Why would anyone stay with at&t after this. I see this as a perfect pair trade. Hey, use the profits to pay for phone/data bill :)

It might be time to buy more Qualcomm stocks as it will be the provider for the CDMA chip.

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