As we saw this week at CES, AT&T was busy announcing high end Android smartphones as the writing on the wall indicates they will be losing their exclusive hold on the iPhone soon and need something else to try to retain customers. I imagine lots of people will be jumping from AT&T to Verizon due to the better network Verizon offers for many people. It will be very interesting to see how the Verizon network performs with millions of iPhone customers using data and it should indicate whether it was AT&T's network that fails all the time or if it is the iPhone that jams up the network.
This February 3rd date could also just be the iPad 2 and we may have to wait longer for a Verizon iPhone, but I am very confident it will happen sometime this year and it makes sense that it happens earlier since it will NOT have support for LTE.