As the “provider” of the THE PHONE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING, aka, the iPhone, one might think AT&T would be the darling of the tech world these days.  One would be wrong.  Instead, AT&T is being vilified as the anchor holding the iPhone back.  Articles pop-up daily claiming that Apple needs to drop AT&T exclusivity pronto and get another carrier to pick it up.

The failures of AT&T are certainly readily obvious to anyone that has an iPhone in the US.  The significant issues that most people had about the iPhone used to be balanced between the two companies, AT&T and Apple.  No cut & paste?  C’mon, Apple!  Weak 3G speeds?  Speed up those upgrades AT&T!  No MMS?  Who cares but it seems to be missing from the smartphone most geared toward the consumers, don’t you think Apple?  Occasional dropped calls?  What is this, 1995, AT&T?  Unfortunately for AT&T, Apple has pretty much removed any noteworthy issue from their end.  The 3.0 OS is a huge improvement on the (arguably) best smartphone already.  However, now all of the issues are on the AT&T side of the partnership and as a result, AT&T is taking a massive beating in the tech community.  Pundits are clamoring for Apple to take their iPhone to other carriers who they believe would be fighting each to have a chance to carry a device as successful as the iPhone.  More specifically, the masses are clamoring for Verizon to swoop in and start carrying the iPhone — to save the iPhone or some such.

I have my doubts as to whether this will happen any time soon and if it does, I suspect it will be a pyrrhic victory at best.

By most accounts, Verizon phone service is more reliable, in more places, than AT&T’s and thus the thinking is that, by getting the iPhone on Verizon, we’ll have all the benefits of the iPhone plus the best carrier service available.   The latter may be true but the former is very unlikely.  Verizon is by far the worst of the cell phone companies when it comes to features on their phones.  They have a long history of disabling features (GPS, syncing, etc) on their phones to make them weak impersonations of their counterparts elsewhere preferring instead to sell you an add-on for an astronomic one-time or monthly fee to provide something the phone has built-on.  Memories of my crippled Verizon Motorola RAZR phone that I had several years ago haunt me — the number of disabled features were ridiculous especially when you saw the same phone on Cingular (AT&T) — seemed like two completely different phones.

They haven’t changed too much.  Take a look at the  iPhone AppStore — Along with the user-interface, this is the feature that really sets the iPhone apart from their wannabe competitors.  If the iPhone was available on Verizon, it wouldn’t exist.  Or rather, given it’s success, would be replaced by whatever abomination Verizon creates because Verizon doesn’t want anyone other than Verizon to have an application store on their devices.

No thanks, Verizon.  Not until you change your approach to customers.  Overblown hiccups and missing MMS with AT&T are minor frustrations that I’ll happily keep if I have to choose between that and my iPhone features.