Change is in the wind. There are more and more stories in the mainstream media that you won’t be forced to sign up with AT&T to use an iPhone in the U.S within a few weeks. But I’ll avoid the issue of jailbreaking the phone and using T-Mobile instead, which one of my friends has done for reasons he’s never been able to explain.

Now it’s not that AT&T is necessarily a bad wireless provider. But they have had trouble building out enough capacity to offer a decent connections in some parts of the country. Complains in such locales as San Francisco are legion, although the company claims they are making progress. Here in the Phoenix area, it works just fine.

While it made sense for Apple to partner with a single larger carrier when the iPhone was just a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eyes, this gadget has joined the iPod to achieve iconic status. More iPhones than Blackberrys are sold nowadays, even though RIM has support from more carriers and has many more models to choose from.

The feeling early on was that Verizon Wireless was offered the iPhone, but refused to give Apple the keys to the store. Verizon wants you saddle you with their own software and custom user interface, even though both may offer substandard user experiences. It would probably be worse than giving the Mac OS a full-time Windows user interface.

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This article was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under News and tagged with: BlackBerry, Iphone, Ipod, Jailbreak, Mainstream Media, Rim, Steve Jobs, T Mobile, Verizon Wireless.