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Rick Lindner, CFO of a little telco called AT&T, recently dropped some knowledge about all things iPhone, past and future, including word that AT&T now boasts upwards of 2.5 million iPhone subscribers.

At an average of $100 per subscriber per month x 24 months per contract x 2.5 million that's a lot of green for old blue. $6 billion, to be dashboard calc precise about it.

(With Apple rumored to get $15 per subscriber per month x 24 months per contract x 2.5 million = 900 million reasons for them to favor those revenue sharing models as well...)

When it comes to iPhone 3G, however, Lindner was more reticent:

Looks like we’ll have to add analyzing shipping manifests and tracking import/export data to help wanted ads and patent watching. It’s tough being an Apple enthusiast, no?

The folks over at Import Genius have reason to believe that the 3G iPhone is already stateside. After analyzing data from thousands of U.S. customs declarations for Apple, Inc. they have found 188 unidentified containers of a product never before imported by the company. Hint, hint: 3G iPhone.

One huge benefit of the iPhone's superb web browser are all the web applications that have sprouted up since the iPhone's release.  Just like in Field of Dreams, if you build it, they (developers) will come.  Among the plethora of web apps available, several social networking sites have popped up and this week's Tip is about a unique angle on this genre.  Floort at Floort.com is a site that boasts "We know what you're thinking", and as a matter of fact, they DO!  Read on for this week's Tip and how you can give someone else (or even the world) a piece of your mind!

Going along with our own Blackberry vs iPhone comparison and Crackberry's 10 Reasons Why the iPhone is NO Blackberry , we realized we should cover some basic reasons why people should ‘switch’ over to TiPb’s favorite toy. With Palm fading into obscurity and Windows Mobile feature strapped and overextended, RIM and Apple have become perhaps the two most relevant phone makers today. Which begs the question, which one should you pick?

I’ll offer you ten reasons why you should leave your Blackberry behind and choose to phone different*

*In this article, I am using the Curve as the measuring stick for all things ‘Blackberry’

Read on for the rest of the article!

Crikey! Add 3G speed to the list of beer-brewing, croc-hunting, and bum-booting that Australians claim to do better, stronger, and faster than just about everyone else in the world. Or so an anonymous Telstra exec would have us believe:

Let's face it, Apple could teach the NSA a thing or two about security. Nothing like putting the fear of Steve into someone to get them to bear down and clam up. So, along with patent-watching and the occasional partner leak, about the only way to get any real information about what's new at Apple is via the good old help wanted adds.

Yesterday we mentioned in passing they were interested in a:

One of the hottest and most persistent rumors for the next generation iPhone is GPS, either built in or via BlueTooth hardware module (the former favored by techies, the latter by battery-lifers). One of the most constant and most rewarding (at least sometimes...) factors of the 2.0 firmware beta is developers raking through the code to find every new string and buried screen setting.

Put them together and what do we get? According to some "private" updates delivered to "select developers" (check out the screen shots), we get Geo Tagging!

The great thing about jailbreaking (and no, it's not this) is that a lot of smart people take a look at the capabilities of the iPhone and wonder how come nobody made a (insert program here) yet? And then go and develop said program.

Case in point: A p2p client for the iPhone

iSlsk, developed by Eric Castro, is Soulseek in native app form for the iPhone. It uses the Soulseek network to let iPhone (+iPod touch) users share songs with one another. Once the songs are downloaded, iSlsk imports them into your iTunes library for seamless playback. There is a lot of promise in such a program, imagine being able to download whatever you want, whenever you want.

Robert Scoble is an internet force of nature. Depending on your point of view, even odds that force is either life-giving rain, or death-bearing inferno. A former Microsoft evangelist who acquired a huge social network following that he's dragged with him through Facebook and Twitter to his current endeavor, Fast Company, he'll tell 5,000 friends he's crying over World Wide Telescope, 20,000 people he's QIKing it live (right now!), and an entire readership just what exactly his top 18 "Star-Spangled" iPhone apps. Let's see how they stack up (provided we can hurdle the prerequisite name-dropping in the intro, 'natch!):

Kinda.

Seems the strings to set 3G preferences exist in the code of iPhone 2.0 Beta 5, but the GUI screen that was rumored to surface it was a mock-up, a photoshop, a con-job, a bamboozle.

The process used to determine that the screen was less "shot" and more "not" is rather involved and -- quite frankly -- convoluted but the bottom line remains:

We're getting a 3G iPhone. That 3G iPhone will have settings. We, as yet, have no idea what form those settings will take.

Now bring on the next rumor!