Official iPhone on Verizon Press Conference, Announcement and Discussion thread (1 Viewer)

[Ted Todorov]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sam Posten

Most normal people arent going to notice that 40% speed differential and ARE going to notice the call clarity and lack of dropped calls tho.


If you are remotely a power user it seems prudent to wait for LTE instead of going off contract on AT&T early. LTE will give you the best of both worlds.

If battery life and other tech issues get resolved -- sure. Meanwhile HSPA+ can currently go up to 21 Mbps -- not in any way slower than what current LTE can achieve. And there is of course no chance of a LTE iPhone before mid 2012.

My point: Waiting for LTE is a mug's game -- it's not happening soon, and it's future is not guaranteed.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Originally Posted by Thomas Newton /forum/thread/307762/official-iphon...ncement-and-discussion-thread/90#post_3778073

 

[DaveF]

My wife informed me that she uses data and voice on 3G, so we're not switching back to Verizon anytime soon.


I said, our next upgrade, to iPhone 6, will be on LTE, so it will be OK by then.

 

[Nelson Au]

Just saw a Verizon commercial air on CBS this evening showing the iPhone 4 and uses the, "I can hear you now" slogan. Quite amusing to see both AT&T and Verizon poke each other now, but now with the iPhone.

 

[RAF]

Yep, my iPhone4 from Verizon showed up on Tuesday (2/8/11) at my doorstep and I have it (actually "them" since Sandy's was in the box too) up and running with no problems at all. Verizon has a backup assistant service (free for most data plan users) that keep a copy of your contacts on its servers for those times when you could really use it (stolen/lost phone, other phone issues) and they had a Verizon Contact Transfer App already loaded on the device.


This went smoothly although I would offer two caveats for those of you transferring your Contacts in the switchover (I had 201 contacts on my Blackberry Storm). They are:

• For some strange reason during the sign-in process for using Verizon Contact Transfer they ask you to enter your cellular phone number by also including a 1 before the 10 digit number. Most of us are used to not using a "1" with our cellular contacts so that could cause an error message during entry.
• There is a comment buried within the HELP section of Verizon Contact Transfer that warns you that this App is not reliable over WiFi and that it should only be used over 3G. When I was initially trying to transfer my contacts (WiFi was on in my house and is, of course, the preferred connection for me) is kept getting a "Network Error" message and to try it again or try it later. I first chalked this up to thousands of people overloading their server until I stumbled across the "turn off your WiFi" help screen. And once I did that all 201 contacts were transferred to the iPhone4 in less than a minute.

And, as the nerdy guy stated....


I can hear you now! The phones are working just fine for Sandy and I and about the only thing I will miss from my Blackberry is the way that it handles e-mail to multiple addresses that I maintain. No biggy for me, however since I redirect everything to my @rfowkes.com domain so the iPhone only "sees" a single address. I use IMAP for all my devices except my home laptop (a kick ass Dell Studio XPS) where I use a POP account to clear off the server and maintain my on site backups of all messages worth keeping. Everything else about the Blackberry is inferior (in my opinion) to the iPhone but I already knew that because I had an iTouch4 (64G) that will be making one granddaughter very happy as a hand-me-down.


Anyone else care to share their Verizon/iPhone4 experiences? Here in this part of NY (NYC suburbs) AT&T still sucks the big one in terms of dropped calls and other technical issues. Verizon/iPhone4 completely changes the landscape and the fact that the pre-orders for existing Verizon customers sold out far quicker than anticipated caused the pundits to run back to their Ouija Boards to divine what will happen next. That will be long lines at Verizon, Apple, Walmart, etc. starting in a couple of minutes from now. For some reason if you order over the net the units will start shipping, "on or about February 18" I guess they want people there in person to sell them a bunch of accessories.

 

[Sam Posten]

Cool RAF! Welcome to the club =)


I was pretty surprised to hear about the early shipments. It's VERY un-apple like. You will remember that many of us had early shipment notifications from China on our iPhone4s and iPads and Apple actually had the delivery services hold them in depot until the launch days...

 

[Ronald Epstein]

RAF,


May I also welcome you to the club.


RAF and I tested out Facetime last night and for the

most part, it worked well.


He was on WiFi and I was on a jailbroken iPhone with

my 3G connection and it worked quite good except for

an abrupt disconnect caused by the fact I was at work

and had low signal strength.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Got our Verizon phones today. Will start testing them out tonight. I'm curious how the mail is handled differently on the Blackberry. Obviously it has push capabilities (which you can still get on the iPhone if you use Mobile Me), but the unified inbox in iOS is similar to how I remember the Blackberry. Does the Blackberry combine inbound and outbound messages in the same mailbox or something?

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Irony of ironies: My very first voice call on a Verizon iPhone...and it got dropped. Granted it was in my subterranean train station where I get no AT&T service and my follow up call went through okay, but it was still amusing nonetheless, given the rapturous reviews of Verizon's network reliability. The voice calls may be much more reliable. The data service...not so much in early testing. I have to do side by side speed comparisons of a GSM iPhone and the CDMA iPhone. I guess I can't say I'm exactly shocked since UMTS (GSM) is faster than CDMA, but in my early testing the AT&T data network has been consistently faster...in some cases twice as fast on download speeds and as much as five times as fast on upload speeds. I plan on doing some traveling over the weekend, so I'll see if the results are consistent throughout the region.


I also had the opportunity to use one of Verizon's LTE data cards that recently received Mac drivers and the results for that were stunning for a mobile broadband card...over 21Mbps down and over 5Mbps up. That means the Internet connection on my morning and evening commute is faster than my Uverse Internet service at home.

 

[Sam Posten]

Yeah, I'd get one for my laptop but the data cap makes it worthless to me. I don't understand the concept here...

 

[RAF]

With the release of iOS4 any advantage that the Blackberry had over the iPhone when dealing with multiple eMail accounts is, for all practical purposes, gone. In the "early" days the Blackberry was able to set up and handle such multiple accounts without much if any intervention by the user. But to get the same effect on the early iPhones one had to know some of the workarounds (like my re-routing all my e-mail addresses through a single one - in my case [email protected].) That way any "i" devices would only be dealing with a single email address even though everything else was going through the same pipeline. Now with Exchange in iOS4 the iPhone is essentially a corporate device (if you want it to be.)


I've documented many times my reason for not jumping on the iPhone bandwagon on January 9, 2007 and it boiled down to one thing - AT&T. Horrendous carrier in my neck of the woods and it still hasn't improved significantly. The day that the iTouch debuted I had one and the minute that the Verizon iPhone was released I was on board with it. I now have a reliable phone and, being a long time iTouch user, it has been an easy transition to my iPhone4.


People can talk all they want about Android and Windows7 phones and the size of the screens, internal memory, yada yada yada but you really can't argue with many hundreds of thousands of iPhone apps (sure, not all of them are great but many of them are). And whenever the iPhone5 or LTE or whatever comes out I'll upgrade to it.


This all reminds me of the early days of printers when HP made the best units and all other brands (Canon, Toshiba, etc.etc.) included an "HP emulation mode" so that they would work with most software. In those days the HP printers weren't any more expensive than the other brands so I always advised people to buy HP printers to avoid driver conflicts and other issues. In other words, why would you buy a printer that could emulate an HP printer when you can have a real HP printer for the same money? Now that the iPhone is available on a more reliable network for use as a PHONE (lest we forget!) why wouldn't I just get an iPhone instead of something else when the costs are about the same and the applications blow away the competition. It's the HP model all over again. Good phone - GREAT device!

 

[mattCR]

RAF, I respectfully disagree. I do agree that iOS4 has come a long way in handling multiple email addresses, and it is a much better product for it.


But let me ask: how many Exchange Servers are you supporting in iOS4? 1. How many come to a Blackberry? Infinite. It is not a huge group of people, but if you have more then 1 Exchange Server that you have to receive mail on and respond intra-office, then only BB, WP7 do it (though Android is said to have this in it's next phone revision).

I think Apple has made a HUGE jump in IOS4 with it's support of enterprise, and it deserves to be accepted for that, because most users only care about 1 exchange server.

Then again, I keep waiting for Apple to come out with a phone with a slide out keyboard, though it apparently isn't happening. *shrug*


My wife who has the iPhone4 (ATT) would tell tend to say the same, it's probably the best touch screen phone I have ever seen, it is beautiful, fun, works exactly as you'd expect it too, and I'd strongly recommend it (for someone else). But for us multiple exchange keyboard pounders..

Originally Posted by RAF .) That way any "i" devices would only be dealing with a single email address even though everything else was going through the same pipeline. Now with Exchange in iOS4 the iPhone is essentially a corporate device (if you want it to be.)


I've documented many times my reason for not jumping on the iPhone bandwagon on January 9, 2007 and it boiled down to one thing - AT&T. Horrendous carrier in my neck of the woods and it still hasn't improved significantly. The day that the iTouch debuted I had one and the minute that the Verizon iPhone was released I was on board with it. I now have a reliable phone and, being a long time iTouch user, it has been an easy transition to my iPhone4.


People can talk all they want about Android and Windows7 phones and the size of the screens, internal memory, yada yada yada but you really can't argue with many hundreds of thousands of iPhone apps (sure, not all of them are great but many of them are). And whenever the iPhone5 or LTE or whatever comes out I'll upgrade to it.

 

[RAF]

Matt (you can be respectful, or disrespectful, or anything else that you like - I have thick skin - to go along with my thick Calabrese head

 

[mattCR]

Yep. I think without major change, RIM is working itself into an enterprise level product only. That's going to be hard for them to overcome. Since only RIM and WP7 support multiple exchange without IMAP hooks, I can't switch... WP7 just doesn't work well enough for me yet. But if Android came out with multiple exchange support tomorrow, I'd go to an ATT store right away, their keyboard isn't perfect, but it's not bad.