Current iPhone 4 Cases May Not Work With Verizon iPhone 4

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iphone-4-vz-comp-rm-eng1.jpg
Verizon iPhone 4 repositions the mute and volume buttons so older iPhone 4 cases will not work.

Early photos from Engadet’s hands-on shows a picture of the Verizon iPhone 4 sitting on top of an AT&T iPhone 4. They look the same until you notice that the mute button and the volume buttons on the Verizon iPhone 4 has been repositioned.

The mute button has been placed in a lower position than the original iPhone 4 on the left side of the iPhone frame. This has led to an offset in the position of the volume buttons also. This means that existing iPhone 4 cases may not work with the new Verizon iPhone 4 model.

Considering all the time and money invested in case design and manufacturing this has to be a set back to the existing case industry and it will lead to confusion in the retail space. However, since case vendors deal with many different phone form factors to begin with this may not be a big deal to them. I’ll be reaching out to a few of them for comment about this soon.

Is this the fall out from Antennagate? Although Apple representative, Tim Cook, claimed that the antenna changes were made to accommodate the CDMA network. I have to wonder if we’ll see the same changes made to the AT&T version of the iPhone 4 or the next generation iPhone 5.

[photo via Engadget]

[Updated to clarify additional changes in volume button position and to correct some typos.]

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