In the World­wide Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence keynote, Apple expressed frus­tra­tion in their part­ner­ship with AT&T, three times. Such open slights beg the ques­tion… do last month’s Ver­i­zon – iPhone rumors have more meat than pre­vi­ously thought?

While dis­cussing the new offer­ings of iPhone OS 3.0, Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice pres­i­dent of iPhone Soft­ware, said:

MMS requires car­rier sup­port as well. 29 of our car­rier part­ners in 76 coun­tries around the world will sup­port MMS at the launch of iPhone OS 3.0 [large graphic on screen lists part­ners]. In the United States, AT&T will be ready to sup­port MMS later this sum­mer. Next…

Crowd laugh­ter and jeer­ing ensued, and Scott avoided eye con­tact with audi­ence while attempt­ing to min­i­mize his smirk. A few moments later, Mr. Forstall dis­cussed another new feature:

Teth­er­ing allows you to share your iPhone’s inter­net con­nec­tion with your com­puter… like MMS, this requires car­rier sup­port and we have 22 car­rier part­ners in 42 coun­tries around the world [large graphic on screen list­ing part­ners], and more will be rolling out later. Next…

After a slight delay, the crowd real­ized AT&T was miss­ing from the graphic, and sus­tained laugh­ter fol­lowed. Once again, Mr. Forstall avoided eye con­tact with audi­ence. He did not make any attempt to defend Apple’s partner.

Later in the pre­sen­ta­tion Phil Schiller, senior vice pres­i­dent of World­wide Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing, was intro­duc­ing the new iPhone 3Gs hard­ware. While dis­cussing the video cap­ture capa­bil­ity, Phil said:

Now, when­ever you have your iPhone with you, you have a video cam­era… just like with the still cam­era, the best thing is you can now share it with any­one, right here from your iPhone. I tap the share but­ton and I can send this in an email, if my car­rier sup­ports it, I can send it in MMS as well.

Imme­di­ate audi­ence laugh­ter fol­lowed while Mr. Schiller grinned at the crowd. The audi­ence under­stood this to be a direct shot at AT&T. He did not chal­lenge this deduction.

At every men­tion of required car­rier sup­port, AT&T was miss­ing. The audi­ence frus­tra­tion with AT&T was audi­ble. Apple’s dis­ap­point­ment with AT&T was evident.

Last month, rumors swirled about the pos­si­bil­ity of Apple devel­op­ing a CDMA iPhone for use on Verizon’s net­work. AT&T’s poor per­for­mance as the exclu­sive iPhone car­rier in the United States cer­tainly increases the like­li­hood that Apple will move beyond AT&T when the exclu­sive con­tract expires in 2010.

The entire WWDC keynote may be viewed at Apple’s website.