T-Mobile has definitely become a wireless trendsetter but it can’t claim sole responsibility for the latest hot trend in the wireless industry. FierceWireless reports that Verizon has actually been offering a free trial service to potential customers in a limited number of markets for the past year, long before T-Mobile unleashed its Test Drive program onto the world that let prospective customers try out its network free for seven days.
Apparently Verizon’s Take Me Home program has been available to some customers living in the Midwestern United States for quite some time now and it apparently let customers borrow smartphones like the Galaxy S3 or certain BlackBerry devices to try out on Verizon’s network free for a limited time. Like the T-Mobile program, Verizon customers unhappy with the service were free to return their smartphones to the company without facing any fees or charges.
Of course, one reason that we’re only hearing about this just now is that Verizon has done very little to promote it. Now that T-Mobile has launched its own free trial service and now that Sprint has predictably followed with a free trial offering of its own, it will be interesting to see whether Verizon decides to make a more aggressive push and expand this program out to more markets.
