Once again, we really do have to hand it to Apple.

We’re finding our inspiration today in tech writer Jeff Kirvin, who unleashes the following:

As a Windows Mobile user, I’m consistently amazed that people take the iPhone seriously as a smartphone platform. Yes, my Treo has an old school 2003 interface and isn’t as shiny as newer smartphones (including “black slab” iPhone wannabes like the Blackberry Storm and even WM devices like the HTC Touch Diamond and Samsung Omnia), but I’m also not hamstrung with arbitrary limitations.

We couldn’t agree more. Case in point (and to which Kirvin was writing): With the iPhone/iPod Touch 2.2 software upgrade comes the ability to download podcasts.

Sort of.

If the podcast is larger than 10 megabytes — and you'll be hard-pressed to find one of any length that isn't — you have to download it with WiFi only, and not over a 3G connection. (By comparison, the last two WM Experts podcasts were 24.7 and  33.5 megabytes each.)

There are times that we loathe the apparent disconnect Microsoft and device manufacturers can appear to have with the carriers. This is not one of them. In this case, we’ll use our Windows Mobile phones as we see fit, thank you very much.

What’s next? Will Apple throttle bandwidth from the phone itself, instead of AT&T having to worry about it? (IPhone fans can thank us for putting that suggestion out there.)

It’s this kind of manipulation from Apple that keeps a good many of us from wanting to deal with the company (and frustrates many who do). It’s not that the hardware’s not sexy. It’s not that the software is lacking. It’s that lines are being blurred, or destroyed. Apple makes the hardware, and AT&T provides the service. There’s too much collusion going on. If AT&T wants to set a 5-gigabyte cap on my data, fine. But don’t tell me how to use those gigs. And don’t use Apple as a proxy to do so.

Kirvin does mention a few Windows Mobile alternatives, including BeyondPod, which we’ve tackled in the Weekly Software Wrangle, and Kinoma Play, which we’ve written about once or twice. We can stream podcasts. We can download podcasts. We can sync them with feeds.

Basically, we can do whatever we (and the software developers) want. And that’s the way it should be.

/rant

A new rumor, that a group of companies wants to create a walled-garden-style search engine for mobile devices, is just the latest in a long string of abuses heaped upon the consumer by mobile carriers. Read on for a good old fashioned rant about the state of mobile data services in the US.

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