They could have tried to, but it would have been circumvented with the quickness, and would have just led to more people jailbreaking/rooting their phones to better suit their needs.
Some greedy carriers prevent (or at least try to discourage) people with smartphones from getting voice service without also getting a data plan, and they would be happy to hear that there are people who believe that it’s not possible. I encourage people to vote with their dollars, and not fall for those kinds of unreasonable business practices. If someone wants all the functions of a smartphone, but doesn’t need internet access everywhere they go, there’s no good reason why they should pay for something they don’t want or need just because the carrier wants to impose artificial limits in order to pad their bill.
Spread the word! Because if they start losing customers to carriers who don’t try to impose unwanted services on their customers, they might eventually be forced to change their greedy ways.
Are you kidding? You must not be paying much attention to Apple. Apple barely even cooperates with anyone else, let alone colludes. They’ve made some limited concessions to carriers (tethering controlled by carriers, carriers can limit VOIP in some ways, might be others), but that’s about it. Even the original design was pretty much take-it-or-leave-it. You know how other phones come with the carrier’s branding on them? The last thing Apple would agree to would be letting some other company screw with the experience of using an Apple product.
Well, I’m surprised they didn’t at least collude more with their original, exclusive carrier AT&T. I’m no Apple fan. I only got an iPhone because I wanted to use it as my car’s stereo and therefore wanted a custom-fitting mount so that I could insert & remove the phone from my car’s dash easily with one hand. Because there was a jazillion different models of Droid phones but iPhones are (or were) all the same it made sense. But I can upgrade in less than six months and I doubt I’ll be getting a 5. Screen’s still too small, different port, no SD slot, locked files, and iTunes for Windows is barely functional crapware!
My car has a factory Bose head unit. Bose units use special speakers (different Ohm rating) so if I changed head units I would had to have changed all eight speakers too! Plus Bose OEM stereos do sound pretty awesome. So I went with a Dension iPhone mount and just a cassette tape adapter. The Dension was expensive (more than the iPhone!) cause it came from Germany (S&H, VAT etc.) but I really like it. Power & audio both come from the iPhone port (no headphone cable dongle!) so the iPhone goes in & out of the cradle easily and with one hand. And the cassette adapter works perfectly.
My carrier offers a data plan that is pay-per-use–no charge if you never use the cellular network during a given month. So you could have that for emergencies, and then just keep it set to wi-fi for routine use, if you have enough wi-fi around where you usually are.
