By now, you’ve seen all the coverage of the iPhone 2.0, including our own (Apple launches the iPhone; The iPhone economy 2.0). You know the drill: 3G, integrated GPS, new SDK, MobileMe synch/push/cloud service, etc.

For our industry, the news behind the news is AT&T’s changing relationship with Apple. When iPhone 1.0 was announced last year, a big part of the deal was the unique partnership that Apple crafted with AT&T as exclusive U.S.-based carrier. The phone would be unsubsidized, a departure from the industry norm. In exchange for the right to sell the phone, Apple would get a cut of AT&T’s monthly revenues on the phone, an even further departure.

Industry watchers wondered if AT&T “got got” -- did Steve Jobs put the screws to AT&T and cut for itself a sweetheart deal?

AT&T execs have insisted they were happy with the arrangement and in its last earnings report had nothing but good things to say on the iPhone and data services revenue front.

Which makes it all the more interesting that Apple and AT&T changed the terms of their relationship with the iPhone. AT&T is clearly paying a subsidy to Apple for the iPhone, helping to reduce the price to just $199 for the 8GB model (down from $599 for the initial 8GB version a year ago).

As Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett’s writes, though, the core issue “is not whether or not AT&T will earn an attractive return from subsidizing the iPhone. The core issue is, instead, the philosophy of subsidies.”

What appears to have happened, especially in a down economy, is the realization that U.S. consumers like cheap phones, or in the case of the iPhone 2.0, relatively cheap phones. For AT&T, the new math looks to mean that if this new arrangement results in * more * iPhones sold, it will do better than its previous revenue-sharing deal. And since it’s hard to imagine the new iPhone not being more popular than the previous version, the deal looks to be a win for the carrier.

But Bernstein’s Moffett wonders if the win is so clear: “The downside is that we are now right back where we were before, in a world where customers expect carriers to underwrite device costs, and where carriers therefore maintain the high costs of retailing as well as network operations. The first generation iPhone offered promise of a way out, and was an important step towards a next generation (post-saturation) ‘open’ business model. The philosophy of the new iPhone is ‘business as usual.’”

The iPhone is anything but a “business-as-usual” device, so it will be interesting what old-style subsidy models will mean for Apple, AT&T and the future of the wireless industry.

E-mail me at rkarpinski@telephonyonline.com.