Smartphone Wars II

Following up on my post yesterday, two new bits:

The Droid dropped today.  It looks pretty slick.  It'll go on sale in a bit more than a week.  Until then, we wait.

Second, the elephant I passed over yesterday was, of course, the Blackberry, which still does dominate the smartphone market.  But I came across this chart (via Digital Daily) that shows the iPhone catching up at an amazing rate.

This illustrates a point I started to make at the end of yesterday's post. The iPhone has become the default for personal-use smartphones.  Its customer satisfaction is head and shoulders above competitors.  As far as I can tell, the only thing holding it back from completely dominating the market is its marriage to the AT&T network, which just doesn't have the coverage of Verizon's. 

So that's why I was wondering out loud what could possibly be holding Apple back from signing up with Verizon.  Presumably, it couldn't be anything other than the big check they get from AT&T for exclusivity... but at what price does one cede domination?