This week, news that many eagerly awaited finally came true: the iPhone will become available for Verizon Wireless customers in less than a month. Initially, when the iPhone was introduced, many people were disappointed that it was only available for AT&T Wireless customers given AT&T's bad reputation for call quality and coverage and Verizon's good reputation for those things. These people are saying this move was long overdue.
But if you ask me, I actually think it's good that this happened now and not earlier. If the iPhone became available for Verizon around the same time that it became available for AT&T, Android would never have been able to flourish on cell phones; I'm pretty sure the main reason why Android is doing so well now is because Verizon latched onto it as an iOS-competitor, and as Verizon is the most popular carrier in the US, Android thus got a whole lot more exposure and credibility (which probably wouldn't have happened even if other major carriers like Sprint or T-Mobile chose to carry Android and Verizon got the iPhone). This can be seen by the fact that now even AT&T, the company with which the iPhone started selling, is selling Android devices like hotcakes. In addition, now, many Android phones are at least as good as (if not better than) the iPhone, feature-for-feature, so the iPhone, instead of carrying Verizon's smartphone market, is just another feather in its cap. That is, instead of being the only revenue stream, it's just one of many revenue streams for Verizon in terms of smartphones. More competition is always better, and I think it's good that Verizon didn't get the iPhone until now.
