The Early Verizon iPhone 4 Reviews Are In [Reviews]

The first reviews of the Verizon iPhone 4 are beginning to appear and we’re rounding them up for you. Here’s a study the early impressions:

Wired’s Brian X. Chen was just plain happy so that it will use his iPhone as a phone again:

Now I actually know what ” network congestion” means. Switching from an AT&T iPhone to a Verizon iPhone is like finally having the ability to breathe clearly after years of battling allergies. People can hear you better, and you’ll hear them better. It’s that easy. That’s the most important reason so lots of people have clung to Verizon while resisting the shiny allure of the iPhone.

As we all suspected will be the case, the iPhone is the next phone on Verizon than it’s far on AT&T. It isn’t, however, a superior media-consumption device.

SlashGear’s Vincent Nguyen had some words of wisdom to share:

As with any mobile device, I’d always recommend buying a handset because it does what you have to it to today, not due to what’s believed to be coming later. It’s the nature of the industry that today’s new handsets are superseded tomorrow; there’s no global ” right time” to buy a device. If, like many on the SlashGear team – and lots of thousands of different would-be users – the iPhone 4′s functionality caters for your needs, but the AT&T network doesn’t, then the Verizon version addresses that.

Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg sums things up plainly:

Bottom line: In my tests, the recent Verizon version of the iPhone did significantly better at voice calling than the AT&T version, and gives some attractive benefits, like unlimited data and a wireless hot-spot capability. But while you really care about data speed, or travel overseas, and AT&T service is tolerable on your area, it’s your decision to keep on with AT&T.

Engadget’s Josh Topolsky covers probably the most key differences between the AT&T iPhone and the Verizon version:

While the phone does basically look identical on the skin, there are a couple of notable changes. The first of those changes – and most pronounced – is the shifting of the iPhone’s antenna notches (the little black bands that intersect the frame of the device). On the Verizon version, there are four slits which can be symmetrical – two on the end right and left, and two along the bottom. Apple’s Tim Cook told us that the move is all about making the most recent CDMA chipset play nice with the antenna design. There’s no indication that any changes (or improvements) were made to the underlying antenna structure. And conspiracy theorists have in mind: in low connectivity settings, we could get both the AT&T phone and the Verizon phone to dip slightly in bars if we covered the bottom half of the devices with our hands. We didn’t see any noticeable change in call quality or data quality.

Apple has also slightly shifted the mute switch and volume buttons to deal with the antenna changes, and for sure there’s no SIM slot. That will not appear to be on oversize deal, but in the event you already own an iPhone 4 and are switching, your case may not fit the recent design (in actual fact, it’s likely that it won’t). Apple has issued a ” universal” case for both models – but which means you’re dishing out more dough.

Overall, the phone is as handsome to watch and use as it was before… but what did you predict?

USA Today’s Edward C. Baig doesn’t think the Verizon iPhone’s call quality is perfect, but he’s got some praise to offer:

A winning outcome is a slam-dunk as far as I’m concerned, not less than based on my six days of testing a Verizon iPhone in Big apple City and northerly New Jersey. Though not every call was crystal clear – it is a cellphone, in spite of everything – I haven’t experienced any of the dropped calls, to this point anyway, or other frustrating hiccups during my tests which have been driving some owners of the AT&T iPhone bonkers through the 3½ years that the carrier has had iPhone exclusivity inside the U.S.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler made it some extent to ponder the antenna issues:

This Verizon version of the iPhone 4 seems to have none of a similar antenna issues. Try as I would, using the ” death grip” and every other grip I will actually do, I will be able to not reproduce an identical attenuation problem that the previous iPhone 4 model had. I death grip the article, and no bars drop. More importantly, calls don’t drop and information doesn’t stop. Again, Apple won’t comment, but problem, apparently, solved.

Those are the earliest reviews to hit the internet. We’ll update as more become available.

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This post is tagged: attractive benefits, media consumption, network congestion, wall street journal, wireless hot spot