Verizon CTO Anthony Melone in a talk [sub. required] today asserted that the carrier's first 4G phones should arrive in the middle of 2011. The unnamed handsets would come roughly a year after the Long Term Evolution-based network goes live for pure data but would be about six months ahead of the originally predicted timeframe. Any early phone is likely to have separate CDMA and LTE chipsets as coverage will still be small enough that subscribers will need legacy phone support to get service outside of 4G areas.
