The Internet has been abuzz with speculation, but it looks like the announcement will be official tomorrow, January 11th, 2011 (in case you didn’t know what year it was.) After many years of plague and darkness, the iPhone is going to Verizon, and when it does, it’s going to be a game changer for me.
The timing is impeccable too, although the announcement is tomorrow, the iPhone Verizon release date is actually 2-3 weeks later, when it will finally be available for purchase. I’m under the New Every Two contract with Verizon which renews this week, just in time for me to put in an order using that discount rate. Yay!
Anyone who’s been following my blog with any regularity will know that I’ve been using a faux iPhone solution on Verizon by pairing an iPod Touch with a Wi-Fi enabled WinMo phone (a Samsung Saga.) While it worked, my WinMo phone still proved to be the most unstable piece of poopy crap I have ever had the displeasure of using. I mean, OMG. Endless crashes, an unfriendly user interface that intermittently refused to respond to commands, speed dials that would break at random, apps running as slow as a mud in a glacier, and then the days when the phone would temporarily brick itself and not even turn on. The love I had for the iPod Touch was only surpassed by the pure, unadulterated hatred I had for this evil Samsung phone. I will never, and I mean NEVER, buy a Windows Mobile powered phone again.
Besides that, when it DID work, the Wi-Fi drained the battery quickly, giving me only 2-3 hours of air time for me to use my iPod before it completely died on me. As a result I carried around extra AA batteries and a portable charger to help keep the phone going so I could use my iPod to surf the Internet. If the phone started to die I would quickly connect it to the charger, then toss the whole thing into my backpack, and every 2 hours or so I would replace the AA batteries in the charger with a fresh batch so it would keep charging the phone. It was all so terribly inconvenient, especially when someone calls me and disrupts the connection. I’ve often had to reboot my phone just to get its Wi-Fi going again after whatever call I took ended.
Because the iPod doesn’t have GPS built in, I also had to invest in getting a GPS cradle as well to really utilize it to its full potential. Everything that I’ve been doing for the past year, from geocaching, to checking into Whrrl, to navigating on the roads, to finding hotels to stay at via TripAdvisor, was all being done from my GPS powered iPod Touch, which was able to access Verizon’s network using my Samsung phone.
It was a crazy setup, and there were times when I was sorely tempted to take my chances with AT&T just so I wouldn’t have to use this piecemeal of an alternative solution that drove me nuts half the time, but two things stopped me: One, the iPhone wasn’t hearing aid compatible, and two, AT&T’s network is so horrendously bad that an iPhone on that network would have been like using a standalone iPod Touch anyway. For all the trouble I had using my piecemeal solution, whether I was at the deserts of Las Vegas or the mountains of New Hampshire, Verizon was rock solid wherever I went, and at times the connection was even better than a hotel’s Wi-Fi service. Using a solid network like Verizon had been absolutely crucial for making my travels around the country as pleasant and trouble-free as possible.
So to hear the iPhone going to Verizon, it’s like an answer to much prayer and tears. At last I won’t have to juggle an iPod, a GPS cradle, a cell phone, a battery charger and a stack of AA batteries around anymore.
At last, I shall be free! FREEEEEE!
