ARRRGH. This reminds me of waiting for the SGS2 to show up for Verizon...and then it never did because VZW isn't getting it. At this point it's still a unicorn. Seeing is believing for me this time around.
Yes, but there are a couple of small, but very significant differences.
SGSII:
There were only really 2 things we heard about this phone POSSIBLY being on Verizon. #1, Sammy said it was releasing it in the US
"sometime in August", which turned out to be off, but not by much. #2, some idiot named
Paul Mueller, known only as an "industry insider" said that Verizon would be the first to launch the SGSII on August 12. I don't hold much resentment towards him because his credibility has been totally shot and he will never be cited again.
That's it. Not a peep from wifi or bluetooth certification, nothing through the FCC for Verizon. We all thought, for some deluded moments, that perhaps the Verizon version had "secretly" passed through the FCC, even though the Sprint, AT&T, and TMobile variants were springing up all over the place in FCC docs like they were weeds.
The end result, of course, was that the Verizon variant simply did not exist.
PRIME:
I wouldn't call this a unicorn. Unicorn suggests something that doesn't exist and is supported only by idiots' or liars' claims. That definitely would fit the SGSII Verizon rumors. The Prime, in contrast, has been reportedly seen at Verizon HQ. I won't go into the BGR claims that were backed up by the Korean Electronic Times, but suffice to say that BGR leaked a model number that hadn't really been seen before (i515), which was later confirmed by P3Droid and by a handset with that model number passing through bluetooth certification only 1 day after the BGR report.
I think the fact that Prime has actually shown up in testing circles, having CDMA and an SCH prefix with a North American destination, gives a lot of weight to the notion that Verizon will soon have this monster.
When? That's the question. October has been thrown around, of course, but I think that is rather optimistic.
