It sounds like Verizon's been giving this some thought.

To be quite honest, the salesman (I'll leave him anonymous for now, as I went in as an anonymous consumer) gave me a sales pitch that was as complimentary to Apple as it was in point out its flaws. In no way did he slam Apple or its products; in fact, he complimented Apple on taking existing technologies and making them simple. Of course, he then explained how a Verizon customer could do the same things. Fair enough.

Of course, as he noted, Verizon phones (well, all phones, really) are just a couple of hundred bucks with a two-year contract. Storage space? Well, a large proportion of it on the iPhone is used for the operating system, while Verizon phones use external storage. (Incidentally, a 4-Gbyte card is roughly $129 or so; an 8-Gbyte card is due this month, he said.)

With a special music pack from Verizon (basically a USB cable and some software) music can be loaded from a PC, as with the iPhone; Verizon's spin is that the same music can be downloaded over the air, as soon as you hear it. A special application (Verizon V Cast Song ID) can also "listen" to a song that's playing over a radio, identify it, and allow you to buy it instantly.

He didn't address the video aspect directly, and here Apple has an advantage with both the larger display as well as the video-enhanced iTunes Music Store.

And, of course, he noted that AT&T's EDGE network isn't quite up to par, bandwidth-wise, with Verizon's own.

All in all, a pretty solid pitch. IFull disclosure: I'm a Verizon customer; it's not that I didn't want an iPhone, but that I needed a cell phone when I arrived back in the States three months ago, and couldn't wait. Why didn't I go with AT&T? Some annoying behavior on their part, both on the long-distance side as well as their cellular company. But that's another story, and an issue I'll have to get over if I want an iPhone, at least for the next five years.