Hear and obey

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: Verizon sucks. Yes, much has been made of the fact that they have coverage “everywhere” (patently not true), but this is largely offset by a number of factors: mainly that they’re a CDMA/EV-DO carrier, which means shorter battery life, a smaller selection of devices, and an almost total inability to easily switch carriers or roam abroad (no buying that Chinatown phone and popping your SIM in it with the big red V). And to make matters worse, they are notorious for making asinine decisions (disabling Wi-Fi on their handsets, forcing their own standardized interface in place of the manufacturers, replacing Java J2ME compatibility with the laughable BREW standard) and worst of all, taking every opportunity to nickel-and-dime you for things like transferring the photos off the phone. If you want your mom to have a nice reliable phone to make calls on, sure, get her the freebie on Verizon, but if you want to *do* anything with your smartphone, run like hell and stay there.

Verizon Wireless was formed by the merger of GTE, Ameritch, Bell Atlantic and a couple other nubs who bet their early digital cellular on CDMA, and their setup has always been exactly what you’d expect from a Baby Bell: you’re incredibly privileged just to be on our network, so you’ll shut up and pay what we want from you and take what we give you. For crying out loud, even the biggest control freaks in the industry eventually set up an app store and a developer model and made it possible to record your own ringtones. If you’re going to be tighter than Apple, you’d damn well be able to create a user experience that makes the lame to walk, the blind to see, and restores the virginity of Stanfurd Dollies.

To date, Verizon’s flagship smartphone was the Blackberry Storm, a device so shudderingly godawful that Stephen Fry – who is a complete slave to every new smartphone that comes down the line, the man once travelled with SEVEN iPhones – gave it a half-star and heaped opprobrium on it. But today comes the announcement that Verizon will be offering Android phones – as in the Google phone OS, as in the first thing to legitimately challenge the iPhone’s crown as King Of All Smartphones.

Couple of possibilities here.

One is that this really is the rapture. Google phone on Verizon, complete with Google Voice out of the box as the default system, completely open to apps and modification, fully-featured and able to go anywhere Verizon has a signal – which, as old analog spectrum gets repurposed, gets better all the time. The other possibility is that Verizon continues with its efforts to get a nickel every time you touch the phone, imposes its own interface, charges you extra to access GPS and Wi-Fi, and basically makes a mockery of Google’s promises about an “open platform.”

The wild card in all this, of course, is LTE, the 4G standard that Verizon and AT&T are both moving toward. With the two main carriers migrating to an interoperable network for the first time, it will finally be conceivable to easily move between them with the same equipment. Which, in theory, should make life a lot more interesting – not to mention better – for the wireless consumer.

And to cap it all off, the FCC is explicitly committing themselves to network neutrality – which has already paid dividends, as AT&T has today opened their 3G network to VoIP traffic. Skype without Wi-Fi, anyone? It’s not much, but based on today, it’s possible that mobile tech in the United States is starting to nudge ever so slightly into the 21st century. Not a minute too soon either.