It's been intense lately, enough to give a hardware guru whiplash; everybody has been calling nearly every new object a potential iPhone killer. One of these days someone's going to release a land-line phone with a web browser, and for some reason, someone's going to stand up and call it an iPhone killer. It's bizarre.

Regardless, today is one of the first times that a company executive, not a fan boy, has actually stood up and claimed that its latest phone is going to "kill the iPhone." The company in reference? Verizon. The phone? Its latest offering from LG, the Voyager VX 10000.

"We think it'll be the best phone… this year. It will kill the iPhone," Verizon Wireless Chief Marketing Officer Mike Lanman told Reuters while discussing the LG Voyager. The latest phone's features include a front touch screen, as well as the ability to open up similar to an enV to reveal yet another screen, and a full QWERTY keyboard. It's packed with Verizon's usual gamut of serives like V Cast Mobile TV, V Cast Music, and has the ability to play .mp3, .wma, and unprotected .aac files.

In some respects, it does "one-up" the iPhone. For example, it's on Verizon's high-speed wireless broadband network as opposed to the iPhone, which runs on AT&T's rather slow EDGE network. The iPhone recently gained on-board iTunes, but a WiFi connection is required; the Voyager can download music at acceptable speeds whenever it has access to Verizon's high-speed network. It doesn't appear that the Voyager supports WiFi like the iPhone does, though.

The Voyager also offers a microSD memory slot which can be fitted with up to 8GB of storage—again, another feature the iPhone doesn't have. Other features include Bluetooth support, picture, text, and video messaging, as well as a 2.0 mega pixel camera and stereo speakers.

The front touch display offers a 240x320 resolution screen, while the inside non-touch display offers a 320x240 resolution, according to phoneArena.

Although the phrase is so cliché is gives me shudders, I'm forced to wonder if it won't hurt the iPhone just a bit. I think it might draw the attention of current Verizon subscribers that may be on the edge about switching to AT&T just to grab the iPhone. Verizon told Reuters that the pricing of the Voyager would "range from under $100 to about $400."  It will launch sometime in late November.