snuxoll.com

    In case you didn't know, I like following the musings of Chris Pirillo, Recently, one of his viewers sent in a list of iPhone problems that may be AT&T's fault. Some of these seem pretty far fetched to be the fault of AT&T, while others wouldn't suprise me. Now, keep in mind I've been a loyal AT&T customer for, holy crap, 6 years now, and while I've had a few annoyances with them (primarilly the crippling of my N75's firmware) they've been good to me.

MMS (lack thereof)

    For some reason this doesn't strike me as something AT&T would do, the viewers rationale would be the data used by the iPhone's 2MP camera (which isn't that great of a camera, not in terms of simply megapixels, but general image quality). This seems silly to me, since AT&T has size limits on MMS anyways, and images taken with my N75's 2MP camera are always under the limit. The other oddity, is you could just send the images via email, bypassing AT&T's limitations on MMS sizes altogether.

    Because of this it seems more like crippling on Apple's part, to encourage the use of email instead of MMS, problem is most people don't actually have an email client on their phone. So, while I'd like to blame AT&T for probably the most glaring omission on the iPhone, it is more likely Apple is to blame for this.

Tethering (or able to)

    Yup, totally AT&T's fault, fortunately I don't need to care what AT&T says with my N75, if I want to tether without paying you an excessive amount of money I damn well will! It's quite sad to see Apple bending over and letting AT&T force them to remove this from the iPhone altogether, however, since other mobile operators are much less draconian about data (primarily in europe, god I hate american telecom operators).

Banned Apps

    Hrm, the viewers example of a banned app was Podcaster, which downloaded podcasts straight to the iPhone. The proposed rationale was because this would use large amounts of data, which AT&T doesn't want, this doesn't make much sense to me either. *Maybe* if an an like Fring (a VoIP client supporting SIP and Skype) was removed from the app store I'd believe it was AT&T's doing, because they want to continue to overcharge for voice minutes, however an app like Podcaster serves no threat to AT&T.

    Instead, I have a feeling the remove of Podcaster from the app store was due to Apple not wanting apps to duplicate functionality of iTunes. This makes sense from a product integration standpoint, but at the same point it really ashames me to see people considering the iPhone a 'platform' when Apple can just willy-nilly remove apps it doesn't approve of. This is probably another big reason why I'm sticking with Symbian devices, while the release of Symbian 9.0 and the symbian signed fiasco annoys me, they don't use it to bar apps they don't approve of, and actually use it as a way to protect users.

Video recording (or not)

    I was able to record video on my AT&T supplied Nokia 6102, they are trying to push their crummy VideoShare (AT&T talk for expensive video calls) service wherever possible, along with adding video recording as a bullet point on some of their feature phones. This strikes me as another Apple limitation, whether it's because they didn't want to spend money on a better camera module because I'm betting the current one has poor video capabilites, or because they really think of the camera in general as just for taking a quick shot, because they obviously haven't put much focus into it, at all.

More Data Usage (?)

   Am really unsure what he was talking about here, maketh no(n) sense, so I'm just going to leave this empty.

Anyways, if you didn't manage to catch the link up above to the original article, I'll post it again here. Feel free to leave you thoughts as a comment.