Verizon Wireless wants to crack down on folks who perform illegal tethering on their devices—if you happen to fall under that category of using apps to help you “tether illegally,” then you might want to sit up and take notice. Verizon will now show a warning page when it catches a user tethering without paying, and provides a number to call to set up a mobile broadband package.

After rumors of this news began circulating, an AT&T spokesperson has confirmed that the carrier will be taking away users’ unlimited data plans if they choose to tether or hotspot on the plan. AT&T will automatically be moving those users to a $45/month 2GB tethering plan without the customer’s consent, and the carrier is rumored to start doing this as of August 11th.

AT&T subscribers can thank competition with the Verizon iPhone for a plethora of improvements, including unlimited mobile to any mobile carrier, 1,000 free rollover minutes, and now an extra 2GB of bandwidth for the DataPro tethering plan. There’s still no personal hotspot feature support, but that’s more Apple’s fault than anything else. We’ll see what happens when iOS 4.3 makes in onto our iPhones.

If you’ve been waiting for iOS 4.3, your wait may be coming to an end. We now have ample reason to believe that Apple will be releasing iOS 4.3—which will include the in-app subscription and personal hotspot features—in less than two weeks. Not only that, but AT&T may even support the personal hotspot feature on their network along with their recently announced increasing data caps for tethering plans just before Valentine’s Day.

Yesterday’s Verizon announcement may have you feeling as if your iPhone 4 is somehow less feature-packed than Verizon’s with their personal hotspot feature. It’s a tempting feature, after all; share your internet connection with up to five other WiFi enabled devices (let’s ignore any data caps for the time being). But worry not, for this feature is said to be coming in to GSM iPhones with iOS 4.3. Of course, having a feature doesn’t mean you can do anything with it, since it’s still up to each individual carrier as to whether they want to support it.

The Verizon iPhone 4 announcement today contained at least one surprise. When Verizon announced the pricing they let it slip that the 32GB $299 version would have mobile hotspot included. Wait, what? What’s a mobile hotspot and why doesn’t my AT&T iPhone have it? Mobile hotspot is a great feature that will let you share your cellular data connection with other devices over a WiFi connection. It appears from screenshots that Apple is calling this a personal hotspot and that the capability is built in to the iOS (4.2.5) that was running on the demo Verizon iPhones.

Today, I read an interesting article on MrGadget about why Apple needs to release the next generation of the iPhone soon. If they don’t, apparently Palm is going to break the deathgrip that Apple has on its growing portion of the cell phone market today. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly disagree (even though I want to see another iPhone just as much as the next Apple fanboy), and here are my reasons why.

Mobile Crunch has some information straight from AT&T regarding the iPhone’s current lack of tethering capabilities.

In an interview with Michael Arrington at the Web 2.0 Summit, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega let it be known that an official, AT&T sanctioned method of using the iPhone as a 3G modem for a laptop is on the way “soon.”

Tethering has been possible with the iPhone for some time with apps like NetShare (which was quickly pulled from the App Store as you might remember) and with a jailbroken iPhone. But this is the first significant news of an official not-going-to-get-you-in-trouble tethering option.

Tethering allows you to share your cell phone’s data plan with another computer, such as a laptop. This is perfect for on-the-go when you need an internet connection on your notebook but don’t want to buy a separate data plan specifically for it.

MacRumors adds to this news with a rumor…

An adequately unsourced claim paired with a strong desire for iPhone tethering has created this news item:

A Gizmodo reader says that after firing off an e-mail to sjobs at Apple (which works well, for the record) he got one of those rare Steve responses… sent from an iPhone no less.

Check out the dialogue after the break.

At WWDC ’08, the new iPhone 3G was met with huge support by almost everyone. It had almost everything it needs to be the perfect smart phone.

Read on to hear about some of the biggest items the iPhone 2.0 software lacks.