Verizon iPhone Is Pretty Much What We Expected

Now that gadget reviewers have had the Verizon iPhone in their hands for a week or so, their thoughts about the new device are starting to roll out. It turns out the Verizon iPhone is pretty much what we expected it to be: it's better at making voice calls but its data transfer rates are slower.

"As we all suspected would be the case, the iPhone is a better phone on Verizon than it is on AT&T. It is not, however, a superior media-consumption device," Brian Chen wrote on Wired. Walt Mossberg concurred, saying,"at least in the areas where I was using it, the Verizon model did much, much better with voice calls."

But reviewers face an interesting dilemma. They're reviewing a phone-service combination that can't really be tested before the phone gets out into the market. That's like reviewing driving a car in Los Angeles in 1905. While Verizon's network may be working really well right now, when there are only a few dozen iPhones pulling data down, we still don't know how well it'll perform when there are thousands of them in key markets like San Francisco and New York.

Most suspect Verizon's beefier network can handle the traffic, but so many things about the iPhone and its users have surprised us before.