Ok, so I was wrong on my prediction, it ended up being a CDMA device. Maybe shoot for dreams next year.. sometime for the iPhone 5 around June 2012. I only say this, because I don’t think Apple will up the ante in June to a whole new phone. I think it will be a small step, like the 3G was to the 3GS (aka 4S). I am assuming those defecting to Verizon will be much happier, as well as the rest of us on AT&T will be as well, due to the lightened load. I’ll hold off for opinions to show you the official information that we have.
Verizon iPhone
- CDMA 3G (not LTE 4G)
- New Antenna Design (not phone, just antenna)
- $199 for 16GB & $299 for 32GB
- Wifi Hotspot capability (via iOS 4.2.5, not yet for AT&T, iPad or iPod Touch)
Everything else is basically the same. There was a few Q&A after the announcement to clear up some other questions. There was talk about putting LTE in the iPhone 4, but it would have required a whole new design to get that chip in there. Also, according to Apple’s Tim Cook, this is a multi-year, non-exclusive agreement, but I just don’t see Sprint or T-Mobile picking this one up. I have heard however that many people think that this will be a killer to AT&T, but I am just not seeing this one either. I just watched the 404 on CNET, and they had an idea that AT&T will just start an influx in Android phones to help out. As the Android platform recently just surpassed the iPhone in market share in Q4 of 2010. AT&T hardly has any of those as it stands now, so I could see that to be a plausible idea.
The one thing I don’t get, especially from the video and pictures that were posted, they got the antenna chassis part correct, except for the SIM. The SIM card slot is not present, but all the black lines were correct. So is that a future phone? Possibly the LTE iPhone case for the future? We shall see..