The painstaking wait for the iPhone to land on Verizon has finally ended! After several years with almost monthly rumors of it happening and even several very serious rumors the iPhone 4 is finally available for those iPhone/Apple loving consumers to get their paws on the phone they’ve been waiting for. It took over four iPhone generations before Apple let it off the AT&T network exclusivity and it’s currently only available on the two top data providing networks. It’s launching in February. You can pre order on the 9th and wait in line on the 13th.

Why did Apple wait so long? Nobody knows for sure, but it must have been a sweetheart deal from ATT to entice Apple to only allow their groundbreaking iPhone to run on their network. There was some information recently that showed Apple making around $197 profit per iPhone. They’ve sold over 70 Million to date, do the math on that.

Did waiting so long hurt Apple in the long run?

In my opinion Apple hurt themselves in the long by only doing the exclusive deal with ATT. They hurt themselves because everybody else on other phone networks wanted an iPhone and there was nothing even close to the capability of the iPhone for over a year when it launched and this left a gigantic open and easy hole for a company to fill with a viable competitive operating system that would allow any phone manufacture to run so they could compete with the iPhone.

Google stepped up and created a phone OS that is basically the same as the iOS from Apple and Google gave the Android OS to all the phone manufactures that couldn’t wait to create a phone to compete with the iPhone. Fast forward a few years and now the Android OS has passed the iOS in number of phones sold. If Apple would have released the iPhone on ATT, Verizon and at least Sprint a huge percentage of everybody that has an Android phone now would have had purchased an iPhone because there was nothing else to choose from. Google’s OS would not be the dominate cell phone OS that it is now. Imagine if the iPhone would have launched on all the cell phone networks, there would be multiple times more people running around with an iPhone than there already is.

Obviously Apple has still sold a mind blowing amount of iPhones. They have made billions of dollars world wide and I’m sure they’re not crying or worrying too much about anything they’ve done. There maybe other factors involved that we just don’t know or will never know that persuaded Apple to only stick with ATT.

Now that the iPhone 4 is on Verizon, the next generation Android phones have already been announced and are actually better than the latest generation iPhone. The iPhone 4 has a 1GHz processor and can shoot 720p video and does not have the capability to output video to other devices. The new Droid Bionic and Asteck phones are sporting a dual core 1GHz processor, 1080p video recording and HDMI out to your TV. These are the next generation smart phones and they will be coming out in the coming spring of 2011. Will the next gen iPhone match these specs? Will the next gen iPhone be available on Verizon?

In the end, at least all the people stuck on Verizon for whatever reason can now finally enjoy the iPhone 4 in all it’s glory. Don’t forget to pickup a Verizon iPhone 4 case.