You think there’s nothing more to say about Verizon cell phones? Then think again, because now Apple’s in da house and it’s threatening to change the industry in more ways than you can shake your wallet at!
This is no advertisement, mind you, nor any attempt at marketing but an honest take on what’s happening in this business from someone who is so disinterested a casual observer that he barely owns a cell phone, actually. It isn’t that I have some Verizon cell phones myself, in other words. Indeed, I haven’t a cellular telephone of my own. No, not as such; only my live-in girlfriend’s. (Yes, that’s my only means of wireless communication!)
But I used to be really big on hi-tech, and it’s amusing for me to casually regard – and disregard – all the developments in cellular communications since the 1990s, when I personally first became aware of such devices. At the time, things were radically different – and the same as ever in other respects. Know that old French saying? “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
So, changes: the inventory of Verizon cell phones is greater than ever, and individual makes and models offer all kinds of cool handy features like never before. Yet many terms and conditions for subscribers stay the same, continuing penalties for leaving early and so forth .
That’s where the iPhone figures into all this. There’s the potential for it to really rock the industry. Once the exclusive province of AT&T, its debut over the Verizon infrastructure could really upset things.
That means competition.
That should mean better terms and conditions.
That’s the theory, anyway. But for now, things look about the same as ever. Verizon or AT&T, it’s about the same right now in terms of those terms and conditions. The iPhone isn’t available, for example, on a prepaid basis; only with a old-fashioned years-long contract plan.
So just how is that “changing the catalog in more ways than one?”
Well, again, there’s theory, and then there’s real life. Right now, though the industry is generally a fast-changing one with product cycles in the months if not in the weeks, market forces are still such that the carriers control most of how things work, what policies consumers get. But it can, and should change – and some would even say it’s already changing, or at the least has begun to do so.