Hopefully them ending 1 years on the 17th means the Bionic will be released shortly after(21st would be awesome). That would be quite the silver lining in Verizon's dark cloud
Was thinking the same thing... This policy shift is literally just before the rumored bionic release, which is the first "Real" current technology, 4g enabled flagship phone for the VZW network.
My theory is twofold. First, that these new generation phones are improving so quickly (encouraging faster phone turnover, and a surplus of "like new" products on ebay, etc) that they are making 1year contracts the norm, rather than the exception...when 1 year contracts are probably already less profitable. Secondly, I think the new generation phones are costing more to build, making them harder to subsidize at the same price points. The combination of the two spurred this change.
This would mean the TBolt being the "old model" running on 4g, gets both unlimited data and a 1 year contract to help it sell, but still let TB users jump ship to the "whatever core" phones that come out next year. The bionic is introduced as the power user phone, still snagging unlimited 4g, but missing the 1yr contract since it costs more to build/subsidize. The casual user phone gets launched in the summer, with the newest Iphone, running on 4g... conveniently just AFTER VZW moves to data capped 4g plans (both are due in summer), because hell if Big red wants the 10,000,0000 or w/e Iphone users streaming netflix all day on their network. This way, they've got their early upgrades covered with the tbolt/short contract. They've got their power users covered with Bionic/unlimited data. And they've got all the iphone people, who are typically less likely to be power users, but still going to buy an Iphone anyway, NOT chewing terabytes of data off the network constantly.
