If you are a Verizon customer who has been waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon before joining the rest of us iPhone users, your time has come. Or, at least, it will tonight. The Verizon website says that early tomorrow morning, at Midnight Pacific / 3am eastern, you can finally place an order for a Verizon iPhone 4 to be available for pickup on or after February 10. In the past, when AT&T has started to allow pre-orders of a new model of the iPhone, the phone lines and websites have been jammed on Day 1, making it very difficult to place an order that will make it possible to receive the phone on the first day of availability. It will be interesting to see how Verizon handles what might be a huge influx in traffic. Perhaps by opening up the lines in the middle of the night, Verizon hopes to limit somewhat the people trying to be first in line.
Having said that, as I noted in my original post on the Verizon iPhone, you should consider whether you want a few more months. I suspect that the 2011 version of the iPhone will be available on both AT&T and Verizon in July or perhaps the end of June. If you are a power user who is likely to appreciate having all of the latest cool features, I’d probably wait. If you are just a normal smartphone user who is frustrated with whatever Verizon phone that you are using now and aren’t the sort of person who seeks to exploit every possible feature of your gadgets, go ahead and order now. The iPhone 4 is a great phone; I love mine, and I’m sure that you will love yours.
At the risk of being flamed, I’m going to propose, perhaps even predict, an iPhone Lite in 2011. By that I mean a toned down iPhone 5, slower processor, maybe 8GB, lower grade camera, for those of us who now rely almost exclusively on the iPad to run apps, keep pictures, serf the net, play music, etc. and don’t need an iPhone with all the same apps, but need the convenience i.e. form factor of the iPhone for telephone calls, text messaging, and emails. Yes, I know that there are a zillion other phones available that can do those things but there are many of us (I’ve been asking around of other iPad users) who want to stay with the iPhone and iPad combination but can’t justify having two devices that perform almost equally but for the size. An iPhone Lite 5 would fill a niche market. Just my 2 cents.
Got up at 3am to order… got mine delivered and up and running on 2/7. SO far, so grand… SO much better than the blackberry… still getting used to the tapping, but I’m now hip to the iPhone jive…