According to a source we believe to be familiar with the matter:
• Verizon held management training for iPhone sales last week
• Verizon had functioning iPhones (LTE-capable) in management hands for the training sessions
• Formal announcement coming right “after christmas”, was
• The formal announcement of the iPhones Verizon debut is coming right after Christmas; “Apparently ATT’s final demand so as to maximize ATT’s Christmas iPhone sales”
• The Verizon iPhone will be immediately available upon formal announcement
• Device has been “100% cooked for quite a while” and already shipping in bulk to Verizon warehouses
• The Verizon iPhone is not being shipped to any 3rd-party retailers in an effort to control leaks
• Verizon agreed to take 100% responsibility for security, so all the devices will be in their hands until the official announcement date, and they will then distribute thru channels in massive manner (hence early stockpiling)
• The new iPhone is an LTE device and that fact – the only “LTE iPhone,” exclusive to Verizon – will be the main marketing theme; i.e. “For the new ‘4G’ (cough) verizon network” that Verizon has already started promoting
• As rollout of LTE not actually widepsread, Verizon iPhone will have multi-band chip backward compatibility with regular CDMA
• iPhone 5 was planned to debut in summer as LTE-only, for all contracted carriers, but the clock is ticking and nobody thinks either Verizon or AT&T can get to critical mass to offer an LTE-only version
• Steve Jobs is said to be upset that carriers cannot seem to get their LTE act together more quickly
• Apple is “helping” U.S. carriers (money?) to build out LTE more quickly
MacDailyNews Note: The above information is from a sole source that we believe to be credible, but should be treated as rumor, since we cannot independently confirm the information at this time.
[UPDATE: 10:20am EDT; Fixed typo, added quoted info to bullet point #4, added quotes to bullet #6]
