Since the dawn of time, er, well, since the dawn of the iPhone anyway, there have been rumors circulating about another carrier picking up the iPhone. Always Verizon, always “near” and, to date, always a rumor. However, now we appear to have either aggrandized the rumor or we have truly moved one step closer to this finally coming true. There are several news outlets around the web reporting this, here is one, and here is another. Let’s assume this is true for a moment shall we?
First you have the sheer excitement of a new carrier. The concept of tethering a device to a single carrier in today’s marketplace seems Draconian. Why punish the consumer, not to mention the platform, because of a company’s desire to monopolize a market. If your service is truly better, then it will float to the top. If it is not (AT&T I am talking to you) then it won’t. (To be fair, I am an AT&T customer who lives in the New York Metro area and whose parents live in the San Francisco Bay Area. In case you don’t live in either I will say these are two areas where more bars are certainly not in more places). In other words, the device should not be shackled to a bad service simply because they won the bid.
Second, let’s finally have an apples-to-apples comparison. Well and Apple to Android comparison anyway but rather with a more level playing field. To date there have been plenty of Android articles about their newly acquired market dominance. (Including here). While this is wonderful news for not only Android fans but the entirety of the smartphone market, it is a bit of a skewed metric given the fact that Android exists on multiple carries and on multiple devices. To this end it would be almost incredible for it not to trump a single-devices, single-carrier competitor such as the iPhone. If Verizon is the only new carrier then we will at least have a more accurate comparison at least on the multiple provider front.
Keeping on with service providers for a moment, this move could also open the doors for other carriers to pick up the device as well. If more than just Verizon picked it up, we would really have a much more accurate measure.
With any luck we can all stop hearing about the rumors and start enjoying the realities. In the end, we would all win.
