It has been made official today that the iPhone 4 (4th generation of iPhone) is coming to Verizon and will be available for order to existing Verizon customers on Feb 3rd and to all others starting Feb 10th, 2011.
Since the launch of the original iPhone, it has been a topic of constant interest and during every announcement that Apple had in the recent years. People even compared the iPhone on Verizon to Unicorns. Apple did give away lot of hints in 2010 that it has been testing on Verizon networks and is definitely heading in that direction.
While this is definitely a good move to increase of the carrier options available on a device that has definitely proved its potential. It is note that the device that is being launched is the one that has been announced in Jun 2010 and is already slated for improvement in Jun 2011. There has been some changes done to the antenna design to facilitate CDMA support (may be improving on the Death Grip issue), but nothing more than that.
Going by the history of Apple, when it announces iPhone 5, it will likely have a better specification and some features that will NOT be backward compatible. I feel that the design changes in iPhone 5 will not be as high as the shift from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4. So is it worth waiting for the new phone?
The one factor that will make me consider waiting is that the new phone runs on 3G and not LTE. Verizon is just back from its major announcement in CES 2011 for its investments in LTE and also the new phones it is launching that supports it. Even in this press meet they started with the news on LTE, but this phone still only supports 3G. If the new phone is going to support LTE, then it definitely is worth the wait than getting into something that is already likely to feel slow in the coming months on Verizon network. People who tried the network speed of LTE claim that the pages that took 5-10 secs to load on 3G, load in 3-5 secs in LTE.
It is also to be noted that the CDMA iPhone, unlike its GSM counterpart cannot handle both Data and Voice connections at the same time. This was the major limitation that kept Apple from taking CDMA in the beginning, but looks like they are finally ready for the compromise. This is a limitation of the CDMA architecture, but I thought the LTE framework would have solved it for them. They said LTE would have required a different design and hence they chose to skip it for now and give the basic experience to the users instead.
So for giving a older design and 3G only support, the current generation of CDMA iPhone should be put on hold, unless you have waited for the iPhone to come to Verizon to buy a smartphone finally. In that case we never know when the next upgrade will come to Verizon and hence jump on.
Author: Vinod
Source: Engadget
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