Will Sullivan points to an Engadget post that Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T on the iPhone has been extended through 2010. The details actually come from a long USAToday article that amounts to a hagiography of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

The money quote:

The U.S. cellphone market is rapidly approaching “saturation” — meaning everybody who wants a cellphone already has one. To add subscribers, he says, carriers basically have to steal them from each other. That’s where the iPhone could come in handy, he says.

In exchange for its payout, AT&T got a year extension, into 2010, on its exclusive distribution deal with Apple, people familiar with the matter say. Sources asked to not be named because the terms are confidential.

Under the original iPhone contract, Apple had the right to offer the device to other carriers beginning in 2009. If Apple exercised that clause, AT&T would have lost one of its biggest points of leverage with customers — exclusive access to the iPhone. Nailing the extension “is a very big deal,” Entner says.

Stephenson hasn’t apologized for letting the National Security Agency spy on Americans’ Internet usage.

So I guess I’ll have to wait until after 2010 to look into purchasing an iPhone. Or, like my department chair, I’ll keep my cheap Motorola phone and get an iPod touch and rely on wireless for my Internet fix.

This is nothing new. As I said when the first iPhone debuted last year:

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily have a problem switching cell phone carriers, but I despise being forced to do so for a phone which should work with any carrier (a la, landline phones).

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