Yesterday I took a shot at the iPhone for being long on compromises and short on utility and your comments were tremendous. Today I want to take a look at some of the positive aspects and potential of the iPhone.

No carrier baggage
One of the single best potential features of the iPhone is that won't be tied to a specific mobile phone carrier. One of the commenters yesterday said it best:

Even the best and most popular phones on the US market are always a political compromise between makers and carriers. Everyone pulls in their direction; carriers want features that will squeeze more money (sending pictures and videos; text messaging, etc); makers want more and more features, so that they can charge more. Ordinary users are ignored.

Locked phones are heavily subsidized by the carrier so that they can be sold for almost nothing - with a two year contract and significant early termination fee. The best part of a carrier-free (also called "unlocked") mobile phone is that Apple doesn't have to cripple its features because the greedy carriers want to charge for every picture, text and ring tone.

A perfect example of this is how Verizon Wireless forces handset manufacturers to disable all but the Bluetooth headset profile. Another example of carrier compromise is the Motorola ROKR's artificial 100 song limitation and inability to purchase and download tracks from iTunes Over The Air (OTA). Hopefully Apple's carrier divorce will mean that the iPhone has features that users want, like BT syncing.

Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.