Verizon to make iPhone announcement tomorrow

This past weekend, the Wall Street Journal confirmed what the rest of us were already thinking - the iPhone is coming to Verizon. But unlike previous reports, the Jounrnal pinpointed an exact date for the announcement -Tuesday, January 10.

Tomorrow afternoon, Verizon is holding a special press conference in New York City where Verizon Wireless President Lowell McAdam will take center stage, and perhaps along with Steve Jobs, announce that AT&T's stranglehold on the iPhone in the US is no more.

Indeed, ever since the iPhone was released back in June of 2007, users lamented the fact that Apple's revolutionary smarthphone was only available as an AT&T exclusive. Subsequent connectivity and speed problems with Ma Bell only exacerbated the issue as a large number of folks longed for a CDMA iPhone for Verizon, largely considered the most reliable carrier in the country. AT&T has since made significant improvements to its network, and to be fair, there was no way AT&T could have anticipated just how data hungry iPhone users as a group would be. After all, no one really did any significant web browsing before the iPhone and it's very well possible that Verizon would have been caught by surprise by iPhone data usage had it carried the device first.

But that's all ancient history at this point and Verizon has had plenty of time to prep its network for an onslaught of data usage. With over 93 million subscribers, the iPhone will now be available to the largest carrier in the US, and some analysts are already predicting that the device will instantly become Verizon's best seller with early sales estimates anticipating 2011 sales of 9-12 million units.

Now as for some other details, the Journal notes that the long awaited CDMA iPhone won't hit store shelves until later this month. More importantly, and clearly an attempt to differentiate itself from AT&T, but a subsequent report from the WSJ indicates that Verizon will offer users an unlimited data plan to new subscribers, something which AT&T no longer offers except to folks who were grandfathered in.

And with AT&T and Verizon now both in the iPhone game, the result will inevitably be a net win for consumers who will reap the benefits of two gigantic carriers competing for subscribers.