Last year Verizon surprised everyone by claiming they would open up their network to any CDMA phone that could pass a simple approval test.

Details have finally been released on how this works, and it turns out to be a bit of a crock. The phone has to support CDMA (makes sense), but it also has to support the US E911 emergency system. This essentially means that all the "cool" phones from other CDMA countries (like Korea) will never pass the test.

In fact, I doubt there is a single CDMA phone with E911 that isn’t already supported and approved for use by Verizon. Why would any company make a CDMA device and not have it available for the largest CDMA provider in the country? In reality the entire program will most likely only benefit niche applications and be of no use to us commoners.

You can read more about the Verizon "open development" program here.