GreenBkk.com Tech | Verizon iPhone: The reviews are in

Verizon iPhone: The reviews are in

Posted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The verdict is unanimous: It's slower than AT&Ts, but it rarely drops calls

Source: Verizon

Pre-orders for the Verizon (VZ) iPhone began Thursday, and deliveries will begin next week, but Apple (AAPL) made review copies available to its favorite publications -- before Verizon's network might suffer, like AT&T's (T) did, the strain of a few million new bandwidth hogs.

With that caveat, a sampling of the reviews:

- The New York Times' David Pogue: "To answer everyone's question, the Verizon iPhone is nearly the same as AT&T's iPhone 4 — but it doesn't drop calls. For several million Americans, that makes it the holy grail.

- The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg: "What about the trade-offs? Chief among them is data speed... despite a few Verizon victories here and there, AT&T's network averaged 46% faster at download speeds and 24% faster at upload speeds."

- TechCrunch's MG Siegler: "Yesterday, I made a 45-minute phone call from my office. This seemingly unremarkable statement is remarkable for two reasons. First, I was able to place a call from my office — something which was impossible for me to do a week prior. Second, I made it through the entire 45-minutes without the call being dropped once. Again, this was impossible a week prior."

- Bloomberg Businessweek's Rich Jaroslovsky: "There are two significant drawbacks to the Verizon iPhone. One is that, unlike the AT&T version, you can't talk and access the Internet over the 3G connection at the same time. So you can't, for instance, check movie times while you're on a call with a friend... The other drawback is that CDMA, which was developed by Qualcomm Corp., is far less widely used outside the U.S. than is the standard AT&T uses, which is known as GSM. So if you need to use your phone internationally, AT&T may make more sense."

- Daring Fireball's John Gruber: "For what it's worth, my end of last Friday's episode of The Talk Show, reporting from Macworld Expo, was recorded entirely over a single continuous voice call placed using the Verizon iPhone 4. It was a 39-minute call (not every minute was recorded) from San Francisco, one block from Moscone, in my hotel room on the 8th floor. No drops, no hiccups, decent quality throughout."

Still unclear is when Verizon's Wi-Fi hotspot feature goes live.

For the nearest thing to a complete list of the reviews, click here.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Credit: CNN (www.cnn.com)