Anyone eagerly awaiting a 5G iPhone probably should be an AT&T subscriber. This wireless service provider will have mobile 5G service in a dozen cities before any of its rivals have it in even one.
Still, rival Verizon hit a milestone today by making the world’s first 5G NR call from a smartphone-size device.
Verizon Wireless spun off a startup that offers unlimited data, voice, and messages for just $40 a month. The new company, dubbed Visible, is currently only offering this service for unlocked iPhones.
But there is a catch: all data connections are always throttled to 5Mbps, well below what Verizon’s network can provide.
If you’ve been waiting (and waiting) to get your hands on a pair of AirPods, now’s your chance. Apple’s wireless headphones currently appear to be in stock at Verizon Wireless with fast, free shipping.
Verizon will soon start charging a $20 fee for anyone upgrading their smartphone with pretty much no loopholes to get out of it. Yes, a carrier is introducing a new fee without much explanation and customers are forced to deal with it. Shocking, I know. The new fee goes into effect April 4.
Here’s an interesting tidbit for you: even as Apple’s stock price has plunged below $400 as twitchy Wall Street investors panic upon rumors that iPhone and iPad demand has slowed, Verizon Wireless has reported that they activated 4 million iPhones in the last quarter. That’s 500,000 more than was estimated, an 84% increase year-over-year in iPhones activated: overall, it means that almost 56% of all phones Verizon sold last quarter were iPhones.
So can everyone calm down about iPhone growth slowing, already? We’ll know the truth when Apple announces their financial earnings next Tuesday, April 23rd.
If you go to Verizon Wireless‘s front page right now, they are hyping the imminent launch of something, which we can only assume is iPad 3 related.
But what is it? An iPad 3 with LTE is obviously a big contender, but I wonder if it could be something less splashy but just as important overall, like shared data plans.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – In the aftermath of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, there are going to be hundreds of awards — some official, some decidedly not-so — declaring the best product of CES.
Why wait? We can already tell you what we think the best product of CES is: Verizon Wireless’s network, which is the only one that has not been frickin’ smeared into jelly by the insane data and voice demands of the show’s technical elite.
Right now, if you want to get an iPhone with unlimited data, your only option is to sign up with Sprint… but given how slow Sprint’s 3G speeds are, unlimited data isn’t really saying much. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get unlimited data on a faster network? Say, Verizon’s?
Well, thanks to a little bit of CSR hacking, you can add unlimited data to any Verizon iPhone plan. Better act soon, though. The VZW is likely to shut down this exploit as soon as their engineers get back from holidays.
Verizon Wireless introduced a brand new data plan late last week that gives customers 300MB of data for just $20 per month. It’s available to customers in the mid-Atlantic region from August 18 to September 30, but is expected to roll-out permanently by this holiday season. For those who aren’t massive data consumers but would like to get a little bit of browsing for their bucks, it seems to be a great deal.
According to Verizon Wireless CFO Francis Shammo, it’s not just the iPhone 4 that’s going CDMA and joining Verizon. In an interview with Bloomberg, Shammo declared that a CDMA iPad, which connects directly to the Verizon network without the need for the carrier’s MiFi device, will be available in the future.
Shammo did not give any details on when the device might be available, how much it might cost, or whether it would use the network’s 4G service over LTE, however.
Although the iPad has been sold through the Verizon website for some time, it’s the Wi-Fi only model bundled with the carrier’s MiFi hotspot device, which is required to connect to the Verizon network. Some may argue that the benefit of having the MiFi device is that you can connect multiple devices and share the data connection, however, it’s possible the CDMA iPhone’s new ‘Personal Hotspot’ feature in iOS 4.2.5 could also be introduced to the CDMA iPad.
The announcement delivers another blow to AT&T, who currently have iPhone exclusivity until the device is also made available through Verizon in February.
The Verizon iPhone is a truly exciting prospect for us geeks, for most people, it’s not going to be a big deal. It won’t be an all new phone, or substantially different hardware-wise from the current iPhone 4… it’ll just be on a different network, and that the difference between GSM and CDMA technology is profound just won’t matter to most people.
That puts Verizon in a little bit of a pickle: short of blaring on about how much superior their network is to AT&T’s (and they will do just that), what are they going to do to to easily differentiate the Verizon iPhone from the AT&T iPhone and make it seem like a different product entirely?
Verizon’s Twitter account might have tipped the forthcoming arrival of the iPhone to America’s biggest CDMA network, but Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg is still playing coy about the possibility of a Verizon iPhone.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Seidenberg says that a Verizon iPhone will only arrive “when Apple thinks it’s time.”