Apple only has two options: either give up the mass market in the U.S. and accept slow growth in U.S. sales while Android undermines the iPhone’s base, or launch a CDMA 1X+EVDO Verizon iPhone very soon.
How soon is difficult to say: the sooner, the better. Technology is almost certainly not the limiting factor here — I imagine a CDMA iPhone 4 is ready to go, or close to it, today — so it’s a matter of other influences, such as product timing with the GSM iPhones, supply chain delays, or contractual issues with the carriers.
I have always assumed that Apple has, in fact, developed CDMA prototypes of every iPhone generation. This would be just like the switch to Intel processors, when it was revealed that they’d been doing concurrent builds for years. I don’t know what regulatory hurdles they have with the FCC in order to pull that off, but it just seems like the sort of thing they’d do.
I imagine the sticking point is Verizon itself, which likes to be the company playing hardball in any negotiation. Verizon presumably imagines that its position with the Droid is stronger than Apple’s position coming from AT&T, so I can’t imagine that a Verizon iPhone is a fait accompli except in pure hardware terms.
The people I know with Droids like them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t look longingly at iPhones too. Aside from the perceived superiority of the network, the only other advantage seems to be the full keyboard. My Droid friends all seem a little jealous of the quality of iPhone apps in general, but they’re still able to use apps despite the rough edges. And having hefted both devices I still prefer the form factor and concomitant virtual keyboard of the iPhone, and in DC I don’t actually have a problem with AT&T.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
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