Verizon iPhone Review Roundup

Now that the Verizon iPhone is officially available for purchase, here come the product reviews from testers who received the Verizon iPhone a little early. What’s the consensus? Overall, it’s good. It’s what you’d expect, but there are a few caveats that are to be expected on Verizon. Here’s a review roundup, and here’s what I think will happen for Verizon, now that the iPhone is here.

First, we’ve got Macworld, which had mostly positive things to say, and noted that the mobile hotspot feature works well and has a good radius of reach. The killer? If you’re using the Internet and the phone rings, the Internet connection immediately drops. You don’t have a chance to ignore the call or not — the connection is just gone before you make that choice. That’s a big bummer.

Next, Walt Mossberg at All Things D gave a glowing review of the voice call quality, but did some hard data-churning and noticed something interesting: AT&T was 46 percent faster at downloading and 24 percent faster at uploading. Those are some serious advantages for AT&T. If AT&T is almost 50 percent faster than Verizon’s network, you have to ask yourself: Do you want the iPhone because you make a lot of calls, or because you’re a data hound? If data is your choice, you may want to stick with AT&T’s network.

That data usage assessment was also echoed over at Engadget, which found that its data testing results “were dramatically slower” than those on AT&T. The trade-off again was quality calls that were uninterrupted and not dropped. Engadget, however, did have this to say:

“And conspiracy theorists take note: in low connectivity settings, we could get both the AT&T phone and the Verizon phone to dip slightly in bars if we covered the bottom half of the devices with our hands.”

Engadget also revealed what MacWorld had, noting that calls coming through drop the tethered data connection right away, and also noted that Verizon’s network only supports up to two additional lines for voice conferencing, while the AT&T network supports many more.

With all the reviews, however, there was a common denominator. The phone part of the iPhone is good. Nothing new here. Just be forewarned about the caveats noted above if you decide to switch from AT&T to Verizon. As a data man myself, I’ll be sticking with AT&T’s speedy offerings until a multiple-carrier 4G LTE iPhone arrives. Then the true data speed wars can begin.

Meanwhile, I don’t think there will be a mass exodus of AT&T customers, but I do think Verizon is going to suffer a bit. The company has already noted that heavy data users will be getting throttled 5 percent (ouch) and with the influx of popular Android phones, Verizon may very well be taking a bath if it doesn’t leverage its network correctly. But Verizon wouldn’t bite off more than it can chew, would it?

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