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.