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I've had the iPhone for about three hours now and it's definitely a mixed bag. On one hand it's a truly remarkable device -- easy to navigate and use -- but at the same time it has some serious shortcomings.
I've made a number of calls and the sound quality has varied immensely -- ranging from something like a echo sealed in a bottle ten years ago and reopened in your ear to perfectly crisp sound. Thus far I haven't seen a pattern with regard to carrier or anything else.
Signal strength mirrors my experience with my old phone on the the AT&T network, which ranges from okay to bad, but has never really been good. Welcome to paradise iPhone lovers.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the iPhone is the keyboard. As Apple has pointed out in its videos, the keyboard takes some getting used to, but the suggestion engine is remarkable.
The real pain is entering all your passwords, which, for obvious reasons do not generate suggestions. But once you ham-fist your way through that, I find that just ignoring your mistakes and plowing through until the iPhone suggests the right word really is the fasteste way to type.
Right now I can't type very fast with the virtual keyboard, but I can see where, once I've adapted to it, it will be just as good as a regular small QWERTY keyboard.
I had no problems connecting to GMail, but *all* my e-mail streamed in to my inbox. None of my filters worked -- no messages skip the inbox on the iPhone and no label information shows up, which makes it difficult to sort your email.
If I login to GMail, the same messages are already archived and labeled (though not marked as read, which makes me assume the GMail widget on the iPhone is grabbing unread messages regardless of their location).
As for my regular IMAP account, forget about it. The iPhone managed to retrieve a list of mailboxes, but selecting any of them just gives me the spinning wheel. I gave up after twenty minutes.
Browsing the web is much better. Safari may not be anyone's top choice for a browser, but it works surprisingly well. As long as you don't hit a site that uses Flash or Java.
The camera isn't bad either and even does reasonably well in low light situations, though the images are only two megapixels so I wouldn't expect to them to look all that great when enlarged.
The other small widgets all work just as you'd expect, weather, stocks, maps and more are all easy to navigate and work quite quickly so long as you have a wireless connection.
Turn off the wifi and revert to AT&T's Edge network and you'll find yourself seized with an uncontrollable desire to do [this][1].
Final verdict: There's no denying the wow factor, but overall the iPhone isn't worth the money. For $300 I'd give it the thumbs up, but at $600 you're better off with something else for half the price.
[1]: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/06/watch-an-iphone.html "An iPhone Smashed With A Hammer"
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