Pfft. Smartphones used to be more open because they were the Lexus LSA that gets customers excited about buying their $20k Toyta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H

Pfft. Smartphones used to be more open because they were the Lexus LSA that gets customers excited about buying their $20k Toyta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#As_a_business_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#As_a_business_model). Anything was acceptable because they were not seen as a primary market to optimize. Enter the iPhone, the first smartphone to achieve mass market. The iPhone requires a premium data plan. The iPhone requires an additional data plan to tether only on AT&T. AT&T may have gotten veto power over certain apps in the AppStore. They certainly had input on the maximum file limits over cellular. You see that Apple has considerable power, and that AT&T still has power, but what you don't see is that the consumer has more power in this equation than in the Android formula. Android users can't even install a vanilla OS or their own updates half of the time. Overall the consumer may have less power than in previous smartphone systems, but to lament this is to assume that the carriers would allow a previous smartphone system to become as dominant as the iPhone without imposing restrictions similar to the state of Android.