Still hearing from my VZW source that a Nokia Lumia 9XX model is coming. Have heard that they are not sure Nokia can deliver by Black Friday as they had hoped, but are expecting to have it by the second week of December at the latest, still pushing for Black Friday and trying to convince Nokia that missing Black Friday is bad news.
BUT a lot of the problem is AT&T lobbying Nokia to sit on the phone. I can tell you that Nokia is not helping themselves with Verizon. VZW played nice and agreed to let AT&T have a month long exclusive of the top end Lumia device. I guess most everyone had been hoping and expecting for WP8 to launch at least a week earlier. AT&T is pitching a fit about the VZW variant possibly being available at the end of November because that won't give them 30 days. Nokia wants Verizon to throw them some cash to fix the problem. That IS NOT what you do with Verizon, especially if you have an agreement in place beforehand.
They still want and expect to have a Lumia 920 variant by mid-December. Remember, too, that Verizon doesn't tend to announce things a month in advance. They often will give you a week's notice. Their tendency is not to promote a phone much before it is available, but when people can go to a store and actually look at a functional version of one. Verizon's philosophy is that people come to them because of their network. They want good phones, but they have felt for a long time that their network differentiates them and sets them above. The phone would be worthless if the network is garbage.
I've said for awhile, do not expect to hear anything from VZW about a 9XX phone until mid November at the earliest. Nokia wants AT&T to have a window (and they've been paid to do this). Announcing that Verizon will have one relatively quickly will take away any AT&T advantage with the phone. Of course, any switchers to AT&T will be upset if they wanted to stay with VZW or go to VZW. My own feeling is that I don't think it'll cause any massive move to AT&T. Maybe some Sprint customers who might have gone to VZW.
Verizon is really over the whole "exclusive" phone stuff. They need certain hardware due to their CDMA band (and often that can be enough to claim the phone is a variant). Nokia presently make no phones that support CDMA800 and CDMA1900. So there always will be a slight model number difference between the GSM/WCDMA phones and the CDMA2000 phones. But most manufacturers have no trouble with this and Nokia should not either.
Still big plans for Windows Phone 8. Verizon will push it and if Nokia doesn't get them a 9XX model then they feel it will be Nokia's loss, not theirs. They still feel they will make it take off, doing with it what they did with Droid. It's just if Nokia isn't there with a high end device then you can expect them to push HTC and Samsung (Samsung is working on a variant with the CDMA guts).
Also note that none of these phones list any CDMA support on their sites YET because Verizon has yet to announce. I would be surprised if Verizon announces its first set of WP8 devices before the October 29 event. In fact, I would not be surprised if a big reveal at that event is Verizon's lineup - depending on who all is invited. I could see Verizon releasing details on all their phones on October 30 and then having them available on that Friday. Heck, I could even see Verizon NOT announcing anything and people just seeing them show up one day.
This is how Verizon does it. They are not a big hype machine. They will promote the products they have and every ad will include info about the superiority of their LTE network. A huge part of the reason why they are like this is because their customers are very loyal and very satisfied. They don't fear that they'll lose customers because of some new, fancy phone. Most people are with VZW because they like dependability and quality service.
So don't expect to hear anything from Verizon for at least two weeks. I'd be surprised if we did.
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