If you’ve been thinking about making the switch to a smartphone or considering an iPhone, now’s about as good a time as any. AT&T enabled MMS on the iPhone today, which brings it up to speed with candybar phones of nearly a decade ago. The wireless provider also just found some old iPhone 3G models lying around that it will sell for a paltry $50.

Now, if I were you, I would splurge for the 3GS. It’s faster, has a better camera, and records video, which makes it much more than a cell phone. If you don’t want to drop $199 on a phone right now, though, the $50 3G will do just fine. It’s not that much slower, and you could probably live without the extra camera features.

There’s still one big reason to stay away: AT&T. Their service sucks and 3G coverage away from major cities is spotty at best. Also, you might be able to get Apple’s baby on a different network before your contract is up.

The good news is you’ll be just fine in either case. If you buy, you’re getting a great phone fairly cheap. If you don’t, you’re avoiding all the headaches that come with being tethered to AT&T. That is all.

If you haven’t done so already, you should get out the iPhone cable and update your carrier settings. The long awaited MMS is finally here, delayed for what seemed an eternity by the ever-failing AT&T.

For the update to take effect you’ll need to reboot your phone. From there, though, you’ll have a nifty little picture icon next to the message line of every text. The service allows you to send pictures and video at no extra charge, assuming you’ve already got some sort of bundled plan.

AT&T has announced plans for the iPhone MMS rollout via its Facebook page. We’ve known for some time that the service would be coming on Friday, but the how and when wasn’t so clear.

From the company’s Facebook page:

MMS Update: We know you’ve been eager for this service so we wanted to offer a quick update on the launch plans for MMS on Friday, Sept. 25. Late morning, Pacific Time, on Friday, the new carrier settings update enabling MMS should be live and ready to download through iTunes. We’ll provide the steps and all of the details you need right here at that time.

For my fellow east-coasters, that means we’ll be waiting until early afternoon before plugging and unplugging our phones for updates. Some people are speculating that AT&T is nervous about the update, and rightfully so. This is the kind of update that has been anticipated for so long that it is likely to kill AT&T’s networks in a lot of places. And if the service fails on day one, the public will be calling for the bodies of AT&T executives.

The long wait is almost over, and it looks like AT&T won’t be making good on their promise to iPhone customers regarding the rollout of MMS support. Originally it was supposed to launch in late summer. Well guess what – September 25th is three days into fall. There have already been a number of lawsuits regarding the service delay.

It sucks to be getting excited about this so late in the game, but still, I’m excited. I’m not a big MMS user, but strangely enough my dad is, so I can finally get those on my phone. It’s also nice that the service will work just like an SMS – no additional fees apply.

There’s still no word on tethering, though. “This function could exponentially increase traffic on the network, and we need to ensure that some of our current upgrades are in place before we can deliver the expanded functionality with the excellent performance that customers expect,” an AT&T spokesperson told Gizmodo. It’s statements like this one that truly infuriate me. I know AT&T is just trying to protect its corporate image, but it needs to acknowledge the fact that its service sucks for a whole lot of people, not spout off about delivering that great service customers expect. Of course we expect it. You, AT&T, rarely deliver.

At any rate, have some fun on the 25th. You’ll be able to get access to the service via a software update for the phone. I’m sure MMS will take all of 12 minutes to bring AT&T’s network to its knees.

An irate iPhone customer has decided to take legal action concerning the lack of MMS support for the iPhone on AT&T. The case, which is being brought by an Ohioan, Deborah Carr, claims that both AT&T and Apple used tricky marketing to mislead customers into believing they would have MMS support in June.

The brief is actually pretty funny. It claims that millions of customers purchased the iPhone 3G and 3GS after the “false and deceptive representations and concealments of Apple and AT&T” led consumers to believe they would have MMS support. Yeah, I don’t know about you guys, but that’s exactly why I bought my iPhone. The brief also refers to the alleged day in June when iPhone MMS would become available as “wonderful.”

Now I’m not on AT&T‘s side here. Quite the opposite. The MMS delay is completely absurd, but so is this brief. Referring to the ability to send picture messages via MMS as “wonderful” is sad, and it smacks of a clinically diagnosable level of obsession with cellular service. Will it be nice when I can send a picture message from my phone? Sure. Will it be life-changing? No.

Why Mrs. Carr and the lawyer who went in on this couldn’t have more appropriately worded the brief is beyond me. The words “excessive delay,” and “denied service without adequate cause” just have such a nice ring to them.