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?
According to The Wall Street Journal, they’ll offer unlimited data.
Wow. How 2007! I mean that in the most positive way, though: one of the few things that Verizon and AT&T were able to agree upon in 2010 was that unlimited 3G data at a flat rate was no longer feasible. My guess is that Verizon hasn’t changed their mind any, but they need something to lure AT&T customers away, as well as convince people like you and me to sign a two-year contract for the Verizon iPhone 4 when the iPhone 5 is just six months away.
The question is, will this just be a temporary fake-out promotion, like when AT&T rolled out unlimited, month-by-month data for the iPad for all of a few weeks, or will Verizon need to offer unlimited data indefinitely to attract new customers in a country where everyone who wants an iPhone already pretty much has one?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
