The Early Verizon iPhone 4 Reviews Are In

 

 

The first reviews of the Verizon iPhone 4 are starting to appear . Here's a look at the early impressions:

Wired's Brian X. Chen was just plain happy to be able to use his iPhone as a phone again:

Now I really know what "network congestion" means. Switching from an AT&T iPhone to a Verizon iPhone is like finally being able to breathe clearly after years of battling allergies. People can hear you better, and you can hear them better. It's that simple. That's the key reason so many people have clung to Verizon while resisting the shiny allure of the iPhone.

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.

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

As with any mobile device, I'd always recommend buying a handset because it does what you need it to today, not because of 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 It's the nature of the industry that today's new handsets are superseded tomorrow; there's no global "right time" to buy a device.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 many thousands of other would-be users – the iPhone 4′s functionality caters to your needs, but the AT&T network doesn't, then the Verizon version addresses that.

Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg summed things up plainly:

Bottom line: In my tests, the new Verizon version of the iPhone did much better at voice calling than the AT&T version, and offers some attractive benefits, like unlimited data and a wireless hot-spot capability. But if you really care about data speed, or travel overseas, and AT&T service is tolerable in your area, you may want to stick with AT&T.

Engadget's Josh Topolsky had some thoughts about data speed differences between the Verizon and AT&T iPhones:

So far so good — voice calls are better, minor issues really are minor. It's an iPhone on Verizon's network. Ah, but it's an iPhone on Verizon's network — and that means there are certain considerations you're going to have to take into account when it comes to data.

Let's put this as simply as we can: data rates on the Verizon iPhone 4 we tested were dramatically slower than those on its AT&T counterpart. How much slower? Well, even though network speeds fluctuate based on many factors, we didn't see the Verizon device peak much beyond 1.4 Mbps on downloads (and even that high was rare), and it barely hit 0.5 Mbps on upstream. On the other hand, the AT&T device regularly pulled down above 3 Mbps, and 1 Mbps or more going up. We'll admit that the Verizon speeds were more consistent, but the irrefutable fact is that AT&T's network is much, much faster, at least in our neck of the woods.

Of course, how much that's going to affect you is based on a lot of factors, and in our day-to-day, there wasn't a noticeable sensation of the device being slower. That consistency in data rates actually may have helped in some situations — particularly when pulling down maps. We see our AT&T device stop and start quite a bit on major data pulls, whereas the Verizon phone seemed to latch onto a stream and not stop until the bits were uniformly situated on our phone. That said, there's no denying that YouTube videos and streaming content is going to appear more quickly on your AT&T handset.