The long-awaited Verizon iPhone on Thursday attracted shorter-than-expected lines of customers. Reports suggest that most of the Verizon Wireless and Apple Inc. stores saw only a handful of customers on the first day of Verizon iPhone’s release.

Unconfirmed figures claim that most of the early birds were Verizon customers who hit the stores to upgrade to the iPhone 4, rather than new customers from rival carriers like AT&T.

Hudson Square Research analyst Daniel Ernst questioned 131 iPhone buyers at stores in New York, Arizona, Maryland, Tennessee and Pennsylvania. He found that the lines were consisted of around 70 per cent of current Verizon customers. AT&T iPhone subscribers switching over to AT&T accounted for just 6 per cent of the surveyed.

The analyst said that the longest line he saw had merely 35 people.

Overall, Verizon failed to enjoy the heavy excitement generally seen at the launch of new iPhones. AT&T had been enjoying exclusive rights to sell the iPhone since it was launched in 2007. But, complaints about AT&T’s poor network service forced Apple to launch the phone on Verizon also.