14 DAY TRIAL // Although nothing was announced officially on the matter, everybody seems to be certain that mobile phone carrier Verizon Wireless would start selling the Apple iPhone in 2011.
Following a wide range of rumors on the matter, which placed the release of this device anywhere between this Christmas and the MWC show in Barcelona in February next year, some more specific previsions on the matter started to emerge.
The exact release date for the iPhone at Verizon is still unknown, but it seems that the device is expected to become pretty popular at the wireless carrier during the next year.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster states in a new research note (via BGR) that Verizon is expected to sell a number of around 25 million smartphones during the next year, and that 36 percent of them would be iPhones.
To be more precise, he estimates that a number of 9 million iPhone units would be sold on Big Red's network during the next year.
The figure might not be that impressive when compared to the number if iPhones that AT&T is moving at the moment, but it becomes so when taking into consideration the fact that it would face increased competition on Verizon's network.
During the third quarter of the ongoing year, AT&T managed to sell a number of around 5.2 million iPhones, but the device does not face too much competition at AT&T.
However, the arrival of Apple's device at Verizon would hurt AT&T sales considerably, it seems. The previsions went down from 17.5 million to 11 million units in 2011 when it comes to the number of iPhone devices AT&T would manage to move.
Overall, Apple would benefit the most from the move, since iPhone sales are expected to reach a total of 20 million next year, up 2.5 million units from the 2010 projection.
Since AT&T would lose exclusivity on the iPhone, other wireless carriers in the United States might also pick it up, but nothing was announced on this for the time being.