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There’s nothing like scarcity to make you want something more. Apple understands this, which is why it tightly controls how many iPhones are available at any given time. Some anecdotal evidence is coming in that its partner AT&T is selling out of iPhones in some of its own stores before Apple stores.

By noon ET today, for instance, at least ten AT&T stores in New York City were sold out of iPhones. Our own CrunchGear editor John Biggs, was turned away from an AT&T store in Brooklyn after waiting in line for hours and was devastated (see his bitter-sweet video where he asks, “Am I a person, AT&T and Apple? What if I was pregnant?”).

None of this is too surprising since Apple stores are bigger and can carry more phones in stock. But is Apple artificially limiting how many phones each AT&T store can sell today? One angry reader, Mark Feldman, suggests as much, detailing his ordeal today at an AT&T store in Waltham, Massachusetts. Excerpt:

The manager got up in front of everybody and asked who was here for an iPhone. He then went on to explain that the store was only able to take orders for iPhones that would be delivered to the store in the next 5-7 days. They would take our money and when the iPhones came in we would get a call to come in and pick them up. If they were not picked up in a week, they would be shipped back and the charges reversed. He also said — and this was the kicker – that he had more iPhones in stock but he could not start selling them until Saturday morning due to his contract with Apple! And those would be on a first come, first served basis. In other words, Apple had manufactured a sell out of iPhones for the first day so as to generate “every store sold out of iPhones” [hype].

It’s one thing to actually sell out of your product. It’s another thing to manufacture a sell out of your product.

I am pissed at Apple for taking me for granted! I loved my iPhone and was willing to shell out several hundred dollars for a 3G on Day 1. I feel used. Like a chump who was turned away so Apple could get a nice sound byte on the news and the Blogs. I am so angry that I am planning to vote with my wallet… I am going to wait and buy the BlackBerry Bold which is coming out next month.

(You can read Feldman’s entire e-mail at CrunchGear).

The artificial shortage theory would hold more water if Apple’s own stores started “running out” of iPhones as well. An alternative theory, assuming that this hold-back policy is effective in other AT&T stores besides the one in Waltham, is that Apple wanted to drive more first-day customers to its own stores where it could control the launch better. The problem, though, wasn’t in the stores, it was when everyone tried to update their iPhone software at once, and found themselves holding a brick instead.

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Today is basic math day at CrunchGear where we discovered that if 160 bytes of SMS data costs twenty cents then 1MB (1,048,576 bytes) of data would cost 131,072 cents, or $1,310.72.

Check out the prices for a text message plan on AT&T, the exclusive carrier of the iPhone 3G in the United States. AT&T wants twenty cents ($0.20) per text message if you don’t sign up for a plan. A text message is nothing more than 160 bytes of data. The max is 160 characters, and one character equals one byte of data. Great.

In other words, if AT&T charged data downloads at the rate they charge text messages downloading 1MB of data would cost you $1,310.72.

Read more at CrunchGear

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Is AT&T pushing tower-climbing workers too hard as it rolls out its 3G data network in preparation for the launch of the next iPhone? Philip Elmer-Dewitt at Apple 2.0 notes a curious rise in cell-tower deaths over the past five weeks. Since April 12th, six cell-tower technicians have fallen to their deaths, and at least three of them were working on AT&T projects. During the four months before that, there were zero cell-tower fatalities.

An AT&T spokesperson denies there is any connection, telling DeWitt that the $20 billion upgrade of AT&T’s data network requires no more than a “software upgrade” at the base of each tower. Yet surely there are times when the towers need to be climbed to troubleshoot the new set-up, place testing equipment on the tower, or remove old equipment that is no longer needed.

When Apple 2.0 previously ran a story about AT&T’s rush to roll out its 3G network in 275 market by the end of June, one commenter from North Carolina named Duke asked:

At what costs? There has been such a rush to get the “3G” up and running that communication tower workers are pushed to their limit. As a safety manager and a communication worker I find it hard to justify the “Hurry up and be SAFE” mentality. One of the largest construction management companies preach the 0 accident policy but force you to get this done at next to nothing in a obserd [sic] time frame and a company who used to be raising the bar are certainly not sharing all of the info. Check http://www.wirelessestimator.com to get an updated list of 3G fatalities. I am sure that the companies in question will state they require a 100% tie off but when push comes to shove get the job done.

Apple is expected to announce its 3G iPhone in June. Hopefully, nobody else will have to die for AT&T to be ready for it.

(Photo by Jeff Kubina).

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Now that AT&T and Apple are tied at hip with the iPhone, Apple watchers look to AT&T for details on the health of iPhone sales. This morning, AT&T announced a decent first quarter, with profits up 22 percent, driven by gains in its wireless business. The jewel of that business is the iPhone, which commands nearly double the average monthly revenue per subscriber that AT&T gets from other wireless customers, and is helping to reduce its churn rate. Yet during AT&T’s earnings call this morning, Apple’s shares slumped nearly 4 percent in morning trading after rising over the past two trading days.

Investors were hoping for some indication that AT&T blew the doors off its iPhone sales, and some assurance that Apple would hit its goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of the year. Anything over one million new iPhone subscribers would have been well received. It doesn’t look like Apple delivered anywhere near that number, since AT&T added 1.3 million net new subscribers across all phones. (It added 5 million gross new subscribers before accounting for churn).

AT&T didn’t break out the numbers of iPhone additions as it has in the past. (When iPhone sales beat expectations, they are not shy about sharing it). By the end of last year, AT&T had activated two million iPhones. But during today’s call, here are the iPhone details AT&T provided (per Silicon Alley Insider):

iPhone continues to be very popular with customers, feedback is very good. ARPUs are in the mid to upper 90s across the base. We continue to see customers adopting iPhone. Over 40% are new to us. Nothing really new in trends there. Continued, solid growth. Through Q1 stable.

We’ll have to wait for Apple’s earnings tomorrow to find out how many new iPhones were sold in the quarter. The number could still be around 1.5 million because other carriers besides AT&T are selling it internationally, and about 30 percent are unlocked. But AT&T still makes up the vast majority of iPhone sales and usage. The big bump in iPhone sales, especially in Europe, won’t come until the 3G version comes out this summer.

But handing over the keys to its network to Steve Jobs was the smartest thing AT&T ever did. That mid-$90 average revenue per user (ARPU) compares to about $50 for all phones. Higher ARPUs and lower churn is what drives profits in the mobile business.

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It takes either a very brave or very foolish company to enter the browser wars. But that is exactly what AT&T is doing—in a small way. I was just shown a demo for Pogo, a 3D browser based on Mozilla that is in private beta (we should be getting invites in a couple weeks). It is a project that comes out AT&T’s business development group and Vizible, a Toronto-based company whose 3-D rendering engine gives Pogo a very different look than other browsers. (AT&T is an investor in Vizible). “The concept is not to rebuild the browser,” says Vizible founder and CTO Anthony Gallo, “it is to extend it.” For the foreseeable future, Pogo will only be available for Windows machines.

Pogo works like a regular browser, but it manages pages more visually (see screenshots below). Instead of tabs, it has a scrollable strip on the bottom that shows a thumbnail image of each site you’ve visited during your session. A “Springboard” button on the top left takes you to a grid view of your favorite sites—akin to what you might put on your bookmark toolbar. You can also view the rectangular cells in various Coverflow-like animations. You can do the same with regular bookmarks, which are treated as “collections.” You can drag Website images into each collection or associate a collection with a tag. Then any page you tag going forward gets automatically placed within that collection. Your browsing history is also represented visually, as is your search history. For any particular search, every page you click through to gets saved as part of yet another collection—although you can only see one search set at a time.

A big turnoff, though, is that there are also banner ads in the Springboard and other visual modes. And the search bar is limited to Google and some AT&T-owned product-, image-, and Yellow-Pages-search engines. You can’t swap in another search engine, at least through the beta. Oh, and it only works on Windows.

The visual tricks are neat, but at this early stage I am not sure how many people would ditch their existing browsers for better visualizations. Does it let you browse faster or more efficiently than you could before? I am not sure it does. In any case, AT&T would have been better off releasing this as a plug-in for Firefox. But presenting the Web in a richer, more visual way is definitely part of a bigger user-interface trend we’ve been seeing, especially in search (SearchMe, Snap, and ManagedQ come to mind).

Where Pogo is going is more interesting than where it is at this early stage. Imagine being able to manage all your media—video, audio, photos—through the same visual interface. If Pogo allowed me to “collect” Web videos, photos, and music, and manage them in a unified way like I can with media on my desktop, that would be a big step in the right direction. Check out the video below of Pogo in action, which was taken by my colleague John Biggs of CrunchGear. Towards the end you will see some shots of the underlying Vizible technology, which I personally find more exciting.

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