Long story made short, Apple sent my wife a new iPhone (took 48 hours and was super easy dealing with Apple.) He new phone works great. I sent my iPhone back and in 4 days, I had a replacement that is working fine. My battery seems to last for 4 days, but I don’t do a lot of texting or web surfing with the iPhone.

I am TOTALLY BLOWN AWAY at what these phones do. As a pilot, I am able to easily check aviation weather (with an APP I installed) at my departure airport, airports in route and destination airport. The GPS feature is WONDERFUL… the list of things this phone can do is mind-boggling. I like the ability to press an icon on my phone and check my stocks. (I don’t always like what I see in regard to the value of my stock, but it sure is a great feature…)

I don’t care one-iota that it doesn’t have video capability. I carry a small Sony HD camcorder if I need to video something on the fly.

This phone fits my lifestyle PERFECTLY. It is small enough to carry in my shirt pocket and it never falls out because I purchased a silicon cover that is “gripy and sticky.” This is much better than wearing on the belt for me, because I live on a farm and sometimes jump on and off a tractor or a 4-wheeler and a belt mounted cell phone won’t work.

iPhone has some limitations for some people, BUT NOT FOR ME.

but then again, you admit that you shold have done your homework before buying the headset and or hadnset. If you had done that you wouldn’t be bitching about it not working….

Otherwise, what about the phone don’t you like: battery, user interface, applications, lack of certain functions…

If you’re going to review a phone, review it on the functions of the phone, not on the lack of functionality that an accessory has with the phone. That’s a mistake on the part of the manufacturer of the accessory not fully testing their product with the handheld and placing a disclamor on the packaging to warn potential buyers of that accessory that is has limited functionality with certain phones/handhelds….

ATT sales reps are most likely unaware of this issue, or they are being told by Corporate to mention that it works with the phone, but not that it’s limited in functionality.

You are not missing anything with the iPhone 3G. I got one yesterday and I’m not impressed. I have the Motorola s9 Bluetooth ($100.00) stereo light weight headset that will only sync in phone mode not stereo headset with the iPhone. Wow my new 3G iPhone suddenly feels broken. I even asked the fucking question at the AT&T store will the iPhone work with the s9 headset (which they sell) and was told it would (never said only in phone mode). The stereo headset works with less expensive phones!! I did some reading and found out that I should of done more homework than I did before buying.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9963760-1.html

Sure I can buy this appendage (a Bluetooth adapter to make my $300.00 >>>Bluetooth<<< phone) WORK but what a bulky eye sore JOKE.

http://www.store.motorola.com/mot/en/US/adirect/motorola;jsessionid=0DD9A96E8115B0F3057FC6FA9711D57D.mot3?cmd=catProductDetail&entryPoint=adirect&productID=89147J&messageType=catProductDetail&showAddButton=true

Apple bites hence their logo…

My iPhone can’t get a tower 1.5 miles form our house. My wife’s phone easily gets 5 bars of the same tower. I had to pull the SIM card out of my iPhone and reinstall BACK into my old Cingular 8125 just so I could have cell service here on my farm where we live.

Both our iPhones are going back to Apple this week for warranty replacements. Stay tuned.

Check out my videos on YouTube… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIxZD1jWCUU

As to 3G speeds being barely faster than EDGE… UMTS with the HSDPA overlay is capable of speeds up to 7.2 Mbps (currently). That’s more than significantly faster than EDGE. Several providers around the world have their networks tuned for this speed. There’s no reason AT&T can’t do it. It’d kick the snot out of the out-dated EV-DO networks here in North America.

As to 3G speeds being barely faster than EDGE… UMTS with the HSDPA overlay is capable of speeds up to 7.2 Mbps (currently). That’s more than significantly faster than EDGE. Several providers around the world have their networks tuned for this speed. There’s no reason AT&T can’t do it. It’d kick the snot out of the out-dated EV-DO networks here in North America.

A list of smartphones (HTC and otherwise) that are as good or better than the iPhone:

HTC TyTN II
Nokia E90
Nokia N95 (8GB)
HTC TyTN (no GPS, can use bluetooth receiver)
HTC Advantage
Sony Ericsson P1
Sony Ericsson P990
Sony Ericsson xPeria
HTC Touch Diamond/Pro

Plus many, many others that I can’t remember right now.

So, you can add Astronauts to your list of people that won’t like the iPhone. ;)

Apple has just jumped into the cellphone (handheld computer?) market and already is the standard everyone else measures against and copies. The iPhone 3G is just their first improved model. They are constantly improving/updating the phone, chips, operating system, firmware, .Mac (MobileMe), AppleTV, iTunes and now…the Appstore is offering seemingly limitless ways to add improvements to the platform.

When you participate in these discussions, which are monopolized by lists of features that the iPhone doesn’t have or doesn’t do, there is one thing you should keep in mind: it’s things that the iPhone doesn’t do…yet.

First touch on contact, second touch finding the person, third touch on the address, than touch the the person name and direction to here. It is done with one finger, in few seconds. Got it?

Email Exchange: First touch on email, second touch selecting the email. Agin just one finger. Got it?

Life can be so easy and so many millions of people want this easy life the first day it is available. The few demanding people scaring all other people with all the extreme important features used by 0.1% of the users few times, but making a huge cry every time the feature is missing. Why? Why? why?

More than 5 hours a day using a phone!? Where are you? Never in the office, never in the car? You think all of the people are like that running around the buildings the whole day, using their phone permanently and lost after 5 hours when the battery died?

Is it the slickest package ever, No. Does it do what I want, yes. Would I look at am iPhone if it had the same or better functionality, of coarse.

VX6800

Now it has 3G, and corresponding shorter battery life, and the reviewers are wailing and gnashing teeth at modest 3G coverage and shortened battery time.

If it ONLY had a real keyboard.. etc etc. I tell you what, I live with a Blackberry (thru my job) and the real keyboard certainly does not make up for the 1001 other things it has no hope whatsoever of doing. Web access is a horrific and painful process with the crippled browser. Miniscule memory. Search function is like molasses. Yep, this thing is great at email. (sound of crickets chirping).

Wow, very cool. My apologies for the misinformation!

Sorry to hear about the pauseless number issue being a deal breaker, though…

Having owned the original iPhone since day one (6/29/07), I can say unequivocally that the voice quality is markedly improved in the 3G version - regardless of the call being GSM or W-CDMA. It’s night and day.

To say I am disappointed with Apple’s offering would be an understatement. I was very excited to be selected as a pilot user to test the new 3G iPhone at our corporation - as a long time iPod and Smartphone user I was looking forward to the company finally offering the iPhone so that I could carry one device. Well, after 6 days of testing, I am done - and will be handing it back to IT on Monday. Whoever did the Exchange support at Apple should be slapped - there are so many issues that I cannot believe Apple has actually spent time designing this. Definitely not up to my expectations - most are software issues, so hopefully they will wake up - if they want to play in the corporate space they need to find out what corporations expect.

My experience began to go wrong almost from the beginning. After having IT install iTunes on my laptop (locked down image), I began the setup only to receive an “unknown error 502″ from iTunes once I connected the phone. Support was worthless and said the system was overloaded for new activations - but a little time on Google found a blog that pointed me to the proxy settings. That sorted, it was on to use the phone.

Side by side with my HTC Tytn II it was a clear winner - finally a phone I could put back into my pocket. Service was only one bar as compared to my HTC with 3, but they are on different carriers, so that is really not a fair comparison.

The UI is outstanding and even without reviewing the supplied “finger tips” guide I was up and running after supplying my Exchange credentials.

I headed out, got into my Mini and did the bluetooth pairing to my handsfree (factory installed). Pairing was successful, but for some reason only about 60 of my 600 contacts would transfer. Left it alone thinking that it just needed time, but after 2 days nothing had changed. Deleted and re-paired, but still the same issue. I’ve done a full review of my contacts in datasheet view looking for some common field that would explain the issue, but so far, no luck.

So, in no particular order, here are my other issues:

- Will not dial UK phone numbers that have the embedded local 0 (this means editing all my contacts to remove the 0)

- Battery life about 7-8 hours with my (light to medium) business usage (not listening to music, no videos). Same usage on my HTC gives me about 14 hours. The downside for me is that I really need a phone that can get me through the business day without having to put it on a charger.

- Getting to the corporate address book is a chore - I guess Apple thought corporate users wouldn’t need to look at the address book.

- No Internet Sharing (using your phone as a 3G modem). This would mean buying a separate 3G card for my laptop and having a second data plan. From a corporate standpoint this means double spend.

- No support for Activesync Schedule - I use push from 6am to midnight and pull from midnight to 6am (to conserve battery life)

- No smart filtering, although as you are limited to at max 200 emails messages, maybe that is not an issue.

- No ability to delete or move messages when there is no connectivity. I spend a lot of time on the Tube in London with no service - I normally read and delete mails but not anymore. Why connectivity is required to delete a message is beyond me, but the error messages telling me message cannot be deleted pushed me over the edge.

- You cannot set to automatically download attachments.

- Messages do not automatically download – when you move from preview into the actual email, it is downloaded at that time. The issue I have found is that if I click on a message in preview when I have no service, the resulting email is blank (not even the preview text is displayed).

- There is no setting to determine how much of a message to download. On WM, my company sets the first 1k to download only. This is critical for roaming internationally where data roaming is charged per k. iPhone only offers roaming or not, so it is clear that they did not consider any organisations that need to use their phones outside of one market. There will be quite a few accounting departments dismayed when they receive charges of a thousand pounds or more.

As Eric said, if you are going to make a stand on supporting push email, you would think that they might actually want to look at what was already available with Smartphones.

Other stuff:
- The camera is an experience - did I accidentally get into the Wayback Machine ? Why even bother putting it on.
- No video – recording or video calls. As I use video calls this is another big issue. If it was the only issue I could live without it I am sure, but with all the other issues it is a deal breaker.

I do think the phone is outstanding and I am sure it will do well in the market. From my standpoint however, it remains a consumer device with some corporate features tacked on versus something that was designed with the corporate user in mind.

The pausless number — its a deal breaker for me/

The battery short life is true and it takes so long to charge!

The rest is great.

So I am trading it in for a iPod Touch, earning money in the process, and I will have the best of both worlds!