The Early Verizon iPhone 4 Reviews Are In

The first reviews of the Verizon iPhone 4 are starting to appear and we’re rounding them up for you. Here’s a look at the early impressions:

Wired’s Brian X. Chen was just plain happy to be able to use his iPhone as a phone again:

Now I really know what “network congestion” means. Switching from an AT&T iPhone to a Verizon iPhone is like finally being able to breathe clearly after years of battling allergies. People can hear you better, and you can hear them better. It’s that simple. That’s the key reason so many people have clung to Verizon while resisting the shiny allure of the iPhone.

As we all suspected would be the case, the iPhone is a better phone on Verizon than it is on AT&T. It is not, however, a superior media-consumption device.

SlashGear’s Vincent Nguyen had some words of wisdom to share:

As with any mobile device, I’d always recommend buying a handset because it does what you need it to today, not because of what’s believed to be coming later. It’s the nature of the industry that today’s new handsets are superseded tomorrow; there’s no global “right time” to buy a device. If, like many on the SlashGear team – and many thousands of other would-be users – the iPhone 4′s functionality caters to your needs, but the AT&T network doesn’t, then the Verizon version addresses that.

Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg sums things up plainly:

Bottom line: In my tests, the new Verizon version of the iPhone did much better at voice calling than the AT&T version, and offers some attractive benefits, like unlimited data and a wireless hot-spot capability. But if you really care about data speed, or travel overseas, and AT&T service is tolerable in your area, you may want to stick with AT&T.

Those are the earliest reviews to hit the web. We’ll update as more become available.