As most of you know, there is tons of speculation on the internet and other venues of a "data-centric" device from Apple coming to the Verizon network. With the announcement coming days ago, various outlets have predicted that this new device will be the iPhone.
I am going to stick my neck out as well and say that this is true, and the iPhone will be coming to the Verizon network sometime in the near future. But, why is this bad news? Well, the bad news is not bad news for the consumer. The bad news is for companies like Palm, RIM, and Google. This is also bad news for competing wireless carriers.
Why you ask?
There are several reasons, but I will touch on two:
1. The perception of Verizon's robust network.
2. The establishment of the iPhone
First, everyone out there knows that Verizon has the best network, or so we think that. Verizon Wireless does have a good network, but the network is not above and beyond any other carriers’ network as they would like you to think. Verizon also does a great job of marketing their network as being the best, and we as consumers have been pounded by commercials about how great their network is. This creates a belief that they do have the best network.
Second, the establishment of the iPhone is greater than any other smart device, touch device, whatever you want to call it. The iPhone is loaded with so many cool features and has a huge application catalog to back up the phone with games, productivity applications, etc. The biggest complaint from consumers on devices such as Blackberry, Palm, and Motorola is that they do not have those cool games, cool applications. Look at the Palm Pre. This was a great phone when it launched. People were excited. But, Palm made a huge mistake. We are consumers that want things right now, not ones that want to wait for six months for the app catalog to build. You can make the argument that the phone is new, but we all know that the comparison is made to what is on the market. So, if Palm was targeting the iPhone, they should have built the app catalog along with the phone. The point is that Apple and the iPhone are already established, so when people go to compare, they already know what they are getting when they purchase the iPhone.
The fact that consumers will purchase a device that has more features than they need but never use has to be taken into consideration. Business customers who want the cool iPhone will buy it even if they do not use all of the features that it has.
We can only wait to see what happens in the future with this developing story, but I think that the iPhone coming to Verizon is inevitable.