Verizon Cell Phones The Darlings of Wall Street
Thought you knew all there was to know about Verizon cell phones? Sorry, but with Apple’s recent entry into the Verizon catalog things stand to be quite different than how they were just the day before!
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. I don’t own any Verizon cell phones myself, for example. In fact, I don’t really own a mobile handset at all. Not really, unless you count the one belonging to my live-in girlfriend of two and a half years. (Which is how I make contact with the outside world!)
I’m no Luddite, mind you; I was fascinated by mobile phones the same as anyone else ever since their general introduction to the public back in the early ’90s. 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.”
Yes, changes: the catalog 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. It could be something of a catalyst, a game-changer. Whereas it was once offered exclusively for use over AT&T’s network, it’s now come to roost just as comfortably across Verizon’s own nationwide network.
That means competition.
That should mean better terms and conditions.
Or so goes the theory. So far, nothing much has changed. Whether it’s from Verizon or AT&T, consumer can expect about the same policies as well as prices. 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 the theory, and then there’s practice. For the time being, even though product cycles are measured in months if not weeks in the industry, other factors have conspired to maintain the way carriers do business such that consumers aren’t seeing any differences. But it can, and should change – and some would even say it’s already changing, or at the least has begun to do so.