The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required.
In Europe we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.
Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me.
I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour.
I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.
Once the iPhone and other smartphones caught on those plans all disappeared. Now they're back again with LTE-A/5G.
It's impossible to put too much emphasis on this part. The envisioned MMS money deluge never happened (at least outside Japan? I have zero understanding of market history there), but it was the sole reason that suddenly all phones had cameras. In those days network operators were still the almost exclusive sales channel for phone hardware, so if they decided that phones without camera would not sell, that's what happened. Even if no consumer actually wanted that feature.
I really believe that in an alternative history where the SMS goldmine never happened (and thus no MMS goldmine illusions) it's possible (though not likely?) that we might still use dedicated hardware for image capture. And in that case, given the political implications of "every person always has a camera with them", world history would be meaningfully different, just because its past does not contain that future that never happened (MMS goldmine).
Thenb you got to watch the huge queue build up every Christmas morning and New Years as the inter carrier brokers got backed up hours. All in all, not my favorite carrier app to manage.
On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the phone, but after a trip through MMS they where just terrible.
On top of that, pictures were excruciatingly difficult to get off your phone. I'm not saying the first few iPhones had great cameras, but they did make it relatively easy to move your pictures to your computer and from there to flickr. With the eventual app-store, wi-fi connection made it cost-effective and easy to upload to the web straight from your phone. And chat apps made it reasonable to send pictures from phone to phone.