A few days ago, USA Today ran a story detailing Apple's five-year iPhone exclusivity agreement with AT&T. Part of the deal is that Apple is forbidden to work on a CDMA variant of their cell phone during that time - in other words, no iPhone for Sprint or Verizon until 2012 (or Apple and AT&T have a bitter break-up, whichever comes first).

Verizon COO Denny Strigl was quoted in the story as saying, "'We do have a very good response in the mill. You'll see that from us in the late summer.'" Since then folks have started speculating that Verizon's "iPhone Killer" will be a rebranded LG Prada (pictured above). I'm guessing maybe not.

Why not? First, Prada has been out for awhile and has received generally negative reviews along the lines of, "Really cool to look at but kind of lame to use." At the risk of overestimating Verizon, they know they've got to come strong to battle all the iHype. Prada just ain't strong enough.

Second, Samsung is Verizon's other big supplier of handsets and they've been on a roll lately. No disrespect to LG, as their recent VX8700 for Verizon is a very sweet handset. But Samsung showed off some very interesting smartphone prototypes at CTIA back in March, including two forthcoming Ultra Smart devices with slideout QWERTY boards, touchscreens, and 3 and 5 MP cameras. Samsung is on a roll as of late, and their last big US release was a Sprint phone (UpStage, the US version of their Ultra Music device).

So I'm betting ... or at least hoping ... for a late summer Samsung smartphone for the big V. I read somewhere that someone at Verizon said, "Yeah we'll have Prada ... but that's not the secret iPhone killer everyone's talking about." Now wouldn't that be great? Two high end handsets coming soon to a US carrier, and neither one is from Apple? Could be a fun summer for mobile phones.

Read more: http://www.phonedog.com/cell-phone-research/blog/verizon-sprint-t-mobile...