Remember that announced date of "end of Summer" for MMS messaging on the iPhone? I do, to my displeasure. I have never been a fan of MMS. The reason is because I'm not a particular fan of paying for a duplicated feature. An MMS message is essentially an e-mail containing multimedia attachment(s) with an accompanying SMS notification. The visibility of these messages because they're presented somewhat like an SMS is nice but is it worth paying $0.50 or whatever insanity the carrier is charging for something that would otherwise be completely free via e-mail? My vote is no.

And then there was the announcement of iPhone OS 3.0 complete with basic features that had been missing on the iPhone since its inception (MMS and tethering, I'm looking at you). The presentation was rather forcefully adorned with logos of whom would be partners with providing these services. It was all but apparent it was to shame Apple's US partner: AT&T. And the shame should flow in AT&T's general direction. For they were not listed as being able to support either of these services on 3.0 launch day. In fact, they have yet to announce ANY iPhone tethering plans at all to this day.

MMS is not a groundbreaking new service. AT&T has offered it for years on practically all phones after year 2000. So why is it that hard to turn on a service for a specific device. It's likely because they explicitly had to turn this feature OFF for iPhones because they lacked support the SMS/MMS voodoo until 3.0. But really, how hard is this to do? Certainly it doesn't require 6 months to implement a simple profile change. The only thing I can come up with is that they expect a majority of iPhone users will use MMS messaging thus overloading their MMS (read: e-mail) servers. Again, 6 months is a hugely excessive amount of time for an infrastructure upgrade. What's more, we, the customer, get no feedback on this from AT&T aside from an estimate of "soon". AT&T is not Apple. They do not need to be a black-box, nor is it ingrained into their culture like Apple.

I suspect we'll just get a blitz from AT&T when the switch is finally flipped. That is a bit of a patronizing stance for a company to take but of any kind of company to expect this from, a cellular service provider is at the top of my list. Also, maybe they're just following Apple's lead (ala Snow Leopard), but at least Apple was early for once.

UPDATE: Lo and behold. AT&T has announced September 25th as the magic day. They also touch that infrastructure upgrades are in fact the reason for the delay. Go figure.

UPDATE 2: Now AT&T has even released a video intended to quell our fears or at least, offer up some half-baked excuses. 'Seth the blogger guy' = FAIL!