In case you haven’t paid attention to the Wall Street Journal-generated (and deafening) buzz that’s been going on the past few days, the iPhone 4 is coming to the Verizon Wireless network and its 93 million customers. The official announcement was made at a special event in New York City on Tuesday, ramped up with fanfare, but the shindig offered very few surprises.
Except this: There’s no LTE – which comes as a surprise to many – but the HotSync personal mobile hotspot is included, for tethering up to five Wi-Fi devices. The latter could be the big differentiator from the AT&T version (despite what Verizon execs like to say about the network differences). After months if not years of blocking it, tethering finally became available for the AT&T iPhone this summer – for an extra $20 per month.
Verizon could capitalize on the lukewarm market reaction to that announcement by going large on the data plan announcements – a solid boon for the open Web, Net neutrality types, content owners and video freaks. Conventional wisdom would say that given the tethering function, it’s unlikely the word “unlimited" will be included. But rumors have been flying to the contrary.
The speakers did use the event to big up the network’s performance and capabilities. "We have more than enough capacity on our network," said Dan Mead CEO of Verizon Wireless in his opening remarks. In a dig at T-Mobile’s “HSPA+ is 4G" campaign, he noted that Verizon could call its network “6G." If it wanted to. He might as well have added, “just sayin’."
We’ll have to wait for the upshot though: Data plans were not announced. Regardless, the gadget will set you back 200 clams ($199.99) for the 16 GB version, and $299.99 for 32 GB, which is comparable to AT&T’s pricing.
And what of the 4G decision, or lack thereof? Incorporating existing LTE chipsets meant making “design compromises" that Apple would not make, said Tim Cook, Apple’s COO. So the decision was made to roll out the phone now rather than wait for 4G chipsets to get sleeker – leaving the implication hanging in the air that an LTE version is in the pipeline.
It’s the iPhone 4, a CDMA version, which took two years to negotiate and build, apparently – Big Red and Apple started chatting about this back in 2008. "We had been talking to Verizon for a while," Cook said. "This is just the beginning of a partnership with Verizon."