The only way I can think of AT&T making the wait for MMS worse would be charging customers extra for the service when it finally goes live. Luckily, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be doing that…to everyone.
In the AT&T iPhone 3GS FAQ PDF the company states in plain language that MMS is coming soon “at no extra cost to customers with a text messaging bundle.”
That plain language leaves some room for interpretation, though. AT&T says they won’t charge you extra for the service, as in no extra fee for sending the messages. But how will they count against your SMS bundle count? If, say, you have the 200 messages plan, which costs $5 under AT&T, will each MMS count as one message, or will they dock your total more for sending videos of your son barfing on the dog?
For now I’ll hope they don’t turn their MMS policy into a “credit” system, whereby they can alter how many credits you get charged per message. We already know that texting plans are a racket. Going to credits could send furious texters into a frenzy.
It’s getting hard to quantify success of Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone 3GS was the quietest launch of the product line so far, yet they managed to go through a million phones in the first weekend alone, and without too many hangups.
