I hope so, because that's the only way I'd consider buying one. I switched to Verizon from Cingular because Cingular's service in my area is so bad. Going back to them, even to get the iPhone, is not an option.
I believe it's Cingular exclusive because Cingular helped develop the phone network side of their voice mail system. You know, the cool feature where you can look at your voice mails on the screen and manually decide which one to listen to based on the sender.
That required cooperation from the upstream network and so it was necessary to work with one provider to design what was needed.
I've noticed an almost universal set of reactions to this phone:
1 WOW! We have to get one of these!
2 $499-$599! Ulp. Ouch. that's pretty expensive for a phone, but cheap for what this bad boy can do. I'm still onboard.
3 Cingular! OUCH! I hate those guys.
In other words, Cingular seems to be the biggest obstacle.
Unfortunately, from what I can see, Verizon doesn't seem to play nice with device manufacturers. Apparently they have some very negative policies when it comes to what features a phone placed on their network can do.
You may notice that they don't have the Blackberry Pearl either. The best phones seem to always wind up in the clutches of the worst providers (Cingular, T-Mobile).
Pity :-(.
D