I’ve been with Verizon for a long time, since it was called something else I don’t remember any more (GTE?). In the early days, they were the only company with even half-decent service out in the country where I live. We now have four phones on a family plan.

When the iPhone came out last year, I was intrigued, but not enough to change mobile carriers. I got an iPod Touch instead, and the LG Voyager phone from Verizon.

Although the iPod Touch and the LG Voyager share many capabilities, the contrast between the two devices is striking. Six months use of the two of them has left me eager to abandon the Voyager.

Sadly, the Voyager is riddled with bad design decisions. Just a few of them:

• The Voyager opens up to reveal a real Qwerty keyboard, which might be nice if I sent many mobile messages. The email client is so poor, however, that I don’t do much messaging on the phone.
• The web browser is painful to use. It’s so inferior to the iPod Touch’s browser that it’s hard to put into words.
• The only way to turn on the speakerphone is to open the phone to put it into “full keyboard” mode. This is often clumsy.
• Furthermore, the full keyboard is poorly thought out for use as part of a phone. You have to use shift to get to # or *!
• The web browser is clunky, and the small internal screen is further crippled for web browsing by having the top and bottom lines of the display permanently devoted to status functions.
• The touch screen scrolling is awkward and hard to use.

The iPod Touch, while it obviously is not a phone, is vastly superior to the Voyager as a web browser and email device, and, for that matter, as a calendar, contact list, calculator, and note pad. The emergence of third-party iPhone apps will dramatically widen the iPhone’s lead; the Voyager is a proprietary platform with weak software support. (It’s a great bonus that the iPhone eliminates the need for an iPod as a separate device, but this isn’t the driving attraction for me.)

So when the new iPhone comes out next week, Verizon will lose me as a customer. (Just me personally, alas, as it will take some time before my family switches.) It’s an expensive and painful decision for me. But the iPhone is just so superior to anything that Verizon has to offer that I can’t take it any more.

It’s the first time in nearly 20 years of owning cell phones of all stripes that the availability of a device has overwhelmed the ease of sticking with my provider.

It took a decade longer than we all hoped back in the 90’s, but the mobile web is finally coming into its own. With some of the power in the mobile world shifting to Apple and perhaps to Google, I hope we’ll see a gradual end to the omnipotence of the mobile carriers, which have, in many ways, been a force against innovation. They just can’t seem to get out of their own way when it comes to making phones a platform.

It’s time for big changes in the mobile industry.