Verizon Cell Phones Wildly Popular After All These Years
Thought you knew all there was to know about Verizon cell phones? Well, think again, because Apple’s in da house and its iPhone is changing the catalog in more ways than one!
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. It isn’t that I have some Verizon cell phones myself, for instance. Indeed, I haven’t a cellular telephone of my own. 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!)
But I used to be really big on hi-tech, and it’s amusing for me to casually regard – and disregard – all the developments in cellular communications since the 1990s, when I personally first became aware of such devices. Back then, the market was quite different…and in some respects still remarkably similar. How does it go, the old French saying? “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Yes, changes: the inventory of Verizon cell phones is greater than ever, and individual makes and models offer all kinds of cool handy features like never before. But what’s remained the same are subscription plans that try to tie you down with all sorts of penalties for leaving early – and these plans want at least a year from you, if not more, still.
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.
Meaning, more competition.
That should mean better terms and conditions.
That’s the theory, anyway. 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 how’s that “rockin’ the industry?”
Well, again, there’s the theory, and then there’s practice. Right now, though the industry is generally a fast-changing one with product cycles in the months if not in the weeks, market forces are still such that the carriers control most of how things work, what policies consumers get. But that can still change, as well it should – and there are those who claim that it’s actually begun to already.