I certainly appreciate your outrage, and you're definitely entitled to be outraged.

But even if you don't spend $600 on a phone, there isn't a US carrier that hasn't disabled some feature on it. Part of the reason it takes forever to get new hardware on the market in the US is that the carriers have to run it through their gauntlet, cutting out any features that they don't feel like they can afford to support. So what we get are phones that are half as useful as their european and asian counterparts.

If we get the phones at all.

It's big things and little things ... the ability to download ringtones, the ability to type them in, the ability to send or receive SMS messages, but also the ability to change the "banner" text on your phone, or configure the external display. In fact, I think Sprint is the only carrier that doesn't disable the latter two features on their phones. With everyone else, you proudly display your carrier to the world, not yourself.

So yes! Get angry! And try to whip the rest of the country out of their blithe complacency. Wake everyone up to the fact that this goes on all the time.

Maybe sooner or later we'll wrestle our mobile phones out of the hands of the cell cartel.