Craig Moffet on AT&T’s negative press concerning the lack of MMS and tethering feature support so far:

Apple has radically tilted the strategic playing field away from the network operator in favor of the device manufacturer. Remarkably, Apple has so thoroughly stolen the customer relationship – who would argue that Apple iPhone customers’ first affinity is to the device rather than to the network – that the network is not only irrelevant, it is rather a source of derision.

I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who actually switched to AT&T because their service or rate plans were actually a draw from another carrier. You expect the service to be about the same across any carrier and you make your choice based on either a rate plan or a device you want. I’m one of the people who switched to AT&T solely for the iPhone when the 3G came out. There was never anything about AT&T that made me want to use them and I was perfectly content using an unlocked device on T-Mobile until there was actually a limitation on speed because of my carrier.

Kudos to Apple to actually pushing out a phone that tries to make AT&T improve their network and feature set on a reasonable schedule. As it is, we’re still well behind the rest of the world.

Via Tech Trader Daily.

I haven’t seen a guide that’s quite as easy to follow for the 1.1.1 release, but if you follow the 3 links below in order you should be able to upgrade, activate and unlock the phone again.

1. Revirginize your phone with these instructions
2. Activate the 1.0.2 firmware, update to 1.1.1 and activate the 1.1.1 firmware using Independence
3. Copy anySIM 1.1 to your phone and run to unlock