The hardware changes to a phone to work on CDMA that was built for GSM is very little. They make a special SIM card that makes it CDMA enabled, and then the radio will just require a firmware update.
look at the razrs as example...
As for Verizon bashing the iPhone, i am convinced sprint and verizon held a conference to come up with as many things they could think of to bash the iphone about, or make up about the iphone.
I myself use sprint, and i have an iPod touch. I have a sprint broadband card that i put in my cradle point mobile braodband router that i plug into the cigarette lighter in my car.... this eliminates all my needs for at&t. (I used to work for at&t u-verse, i know all their problems, such as they don't even know who their customers are, and they can't port numbers from their own customers etc..)
When I went to the sprint store to get my phone fixed yesterday, I was talking about how i wished the iPhone was carried by sprint. As soon as the word iPhone left my lips, the guy had about 500 knocks on it. "well you'd have to get the 16 gig iphone as by the time you got done installing all those apps, you'd be out of space" "the iphone you can't even copy and paste on" "you can't replace the battery ever on the iPhone" "we have applications on the instinct" and he even said "the iphone isn't windows compatible so you won't be able to do anything like you can on a windows mobile phone"
I quickly defended the iphone with: "i have an ipod touch, its the same thing as the iPhone without the cellular phone components. Firstly the average app is about 3-5 mbs, so my 8 gig ipod touch if chosed to could hold many thousands of apps. Secondly YOUR WINDOWS MOBILE PHONE would never work with mobile me. Also apple doesn't use garbage batteries so the battery life-span is really good, and by the time the battery would need to be replaced contract would be over and a better iphone will be out anyways. As for copying and pasting, thats not a big deal for me, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to add it. Also you can't mod your instinct like an iphone can be modded.
Then he started to trash talk the camera, i then told him how a phone is made for doing its functions and a camera is meant for taking pictures, but if you can put a descent camera on a phone then go for it. I don't see any camera companies attempt to put phones in their cameras. I also told him that a camera is the least of my needs when it comes to my phone purchase and pointed out how I don't even have a camera on my current phone.
The blackberry touch is a piece imo, having to push down on the touchpad in order to type is ridiculous. RIM in general is going to die, just wait for apple to horizontally integrate and come out with different levels of iphones. I want a rugged iphone with push to talk lol.
Once verizon gets a deal with apple, they'll have to come up with some new iphone "well we weren't ready to get an unproven technology, but now that apple has proven themselves and improved upon their failures in the past, we are ready to accept the iphone into our network"
The instinct is garbage, even though samsung makes the iphone practically. the storm blows too.
iPhone needs to get a projection keyboard.