Users, enthusiasts, and onlookers have been asking about the long anticipated Verizon iPhone and the oft delayed white iPhone 4 throughout the month of August, and yet Apple has only made one official statement in the month of August – and even it was about something as non-iPhone-ish as “iTunes U” downloads. Contrast that to June and July, which each saw half a dozen official press announcements from Apple, the majority of which were directly related to the iPhone 4 in one way or another. But after silencing the iPhone 4 antenna nonsense with a one-off press event, Apple has since proceeded to spent August being dead silent about the iPhone. In fact the company apparently wants to make that streak continue, foregoing its usual choice of Tuesday for its upcoming major press conference, which would have placed it on August 31st, in favor of holding it on Wednesday which places it on the first of September. It’s almost as if Apple wants August of 2010 to have not existed in iPhone history.

And understandably so, as the major iPhone 4 headlines have not been the ones Apple has wanted. It launches the most advanced antenna technology cellphone history, and the geek tech press goes nuts because the iPhone 4 antenna just happens to have the same weaknesses as every other phone on the market. It offers the iPhone 4 in a choice of black and white even though most users would have been fine with just the black model, then repeatedly misses the ship date for the white iPhone 4 model, thus unintentionally increasing the desirability of the color it still can’t get to market, at the expense of the color that is available. The iPhone 4 employs a glass body, interestingly enough, to become the most durable iPhone model ever made – and yet the storyline becomes that Apple can’t manufacture the iPhone 4 fast enough to meet demand because the glass is, depending on which third party you believe, too hard to cut or some other such malady. And even as Apple goes out of its way to work out a deal with AT&T to ensure that those early iPhone 3GS adopters don’t get screwed as far as iPhone 4 pricing, the storyline becomes that Apple still refuses to offer the iPhone on any U.S. carrier other than AT&T, even as millions or perhaps tens of millions of Americans have made it clear that they want an iPhone but they want it on their carrier, whether that be Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile, making Apple’s continuation of AT&T exclusivity look like a suspect strategy at best.

No wonder Apple hasn’t been talking about the iPhone lately. Every story Apple has wanted to be out there about the iPhone 4 has invariably turned into a different story that the company most certainly didn’t want out there. But with Apple now finally ringing in the new month of September with a major press conference, here’s Apple’s chance to finally take control of the iPhone 4 message, which hasn’t really been the case any point during the product’s brief history. But short of Apple shockingly ditching the iPhone 4 in favor of a new iPhone 5 or some other such startlingly surprising revelation, there are only two iPhone-related moves the company can make this week that will put the iPhone 4 storyline on the kind of positive track Apple desires. One, a manufacturing issue, would be the release of the white iPhone 4. The other, more of a strategic issue than anything else, would be the release of a Verizon-compatible iPhone 4.

We know Apple wants to give us the white iPhone 4, as the company has been publicly trying to do just that since July. But the other storyline, the one in which the iPhone comes to one or more non-AT&T carriers in 2010, would require Apple to buy off AT&T and produce an iPhone 4 model with an antenna that can talk with Verizon’s network, which is at present incompatible with that of AT&T. Apple would likely rather wait until 2011 to deal with the specter of multiple U.S. carriers, at a time when the networks of the big four will be far more compatible than they are today. But if there’s one thing Apple can do to trump all of the existing worrisome iPhone 4 headlines combined, it would be to get the iPhone 4 out there on multiple carriers heading into the 2010 holiday season.

It’s entirely possible that, short of a hand-wave regarding sales numbers, Apple might choose to leave the iPhone 4 out of this Wednesday’s event entirely. After all, the company’s September events are typically iPod focused. But if there were ever a time that Apple needed to seize the iPhone message, and needed to do so by giving cellphone-using Americans of all major carriers what they want, that time is this week. We’ll see whether Apple seizes the opportunity or punts to 2011. If Apple does make it happen, here’s what all you should know about a Verizon iPhone in 2010.