Not sure if you guys heard about this, but according to CNN, most of the problems people have been having with the 3G iPhone are due to the phone and not to AT&T's network... Link.

So what are the FCC id numbers of the affected iPhones?

I wish I had more info for you, but I'm sure more will come soon regarding this.

I'm locked into AT&T (company account, but I'm allowed to get any phone I want) I'm up for a phone upgrade in January. I'm trying to decide between an Android phone, Blackberry, Nokia Tube or iPhone. I guess I'm lucky that this chip issue will likely be worked out by then. I just hate how some phones are locked to certain carriers. The Blackberry Storm won't be on AT&T and there is no Android phone for AT&T yet either. Four months to go, we'll see!

Don't get a Blackberry. They suck. I'll go into more detail if you'd like.

I'd like. I certainly think it has flaws, and I'll list them, but overall I'm finding it extremely useful. And if you want a smartphone with a physical keyboard, it's hard to do better than the Curve, IMO.

Negatives:
- sub-par interaction with Google services (but like I've said before, no phone running anything buy Android does this well)
- no touchscreen: sometimes the ball can get tedious, though it's miles better than the click wheel
- third-party applications: Apple and Google are doing it right, by centralizing the application network - finding apps for the Blackberry is a jungle full of quicksand
- I've never liked the menu system
- 2G, though the Bold will be out soon and that looks like some pretty great hardware

Positives:
- A2DP: it sounds just fine to me in the car, and at least on my phone it merely sips the battery
- battery life in general is very good. Yes, I charge it every night, but I could get away with another day and that's all I expect from a smartphone
- the general feel of the hardware is excellent. it feels like a really solid device

Hmm, my list of positives is pretty short, but I still think it's a decent phone. I'm not saying I won't switch over to an Android phone the second some good hardware comes out, though.

I'd like if you did. Every time I go into a cell phone store, the sales folk own Blackberrys (Blackberries?) and tell me how great they are. But they've never been able to tell me why other than saying they're "bulletproof". It appears that "bulletproof" also can mean "hard to customize" to keep the CEO from your company from messing up his phone too much. I'm guessing that it's set up so that Enterprise users can have pretty standardized equipment to make the tech support sane. My cousin does the Blackberry support for a division of Seimens and is always getting sent to a big wig's office in order to set a custom wallpaper or ringtone.

I even tried doing a Google search on "What makes the Blackberry so special" to find out why some people are so loyal. Didn't find much other than spec's on phones. I'm not a heavy user of text messages and I'm not looking for a new phone to do corporate work.

What I am looking for:
WiFi internet browsing. (Blogs, news, weather, web mail, shopping.) Flash would be nice, but not critical.
Integration with PC address book and calendar.
Mp3 player that will resume within 30+ minute podcasts after a phone call or after several hours of taking a break.

Aside from Flash, it looks like you want an iPhone.

I would agree.

I have just handed back my Blackberry, and I won't miss the device much at all. But I would miss having my email in my pocket all the time, and the iPhone now does a much better job of that in the 2.1 software.

Things I never got on with in the Blackberry were looking up contacts and using the web. The iPhone isn't as good (IMHO) at email if you have large volumes of emails coming into your inbox (I used to have say upto 100-150 a day) but over all it is a much better product to carry around and use as more than a tool.

In the end I really liked that I couldn't mess with the blackberry, I didn't really need to now I look at it. So I agree with the bulletproof statement too.

Cheers

Cris.

Does any mobile device have the ability to play a reasonably recent version of flash? All the devices I've seen either just don't support it at all or only support really old versions of flash.

I have a Blackberry 8820, so this will all apply to it where device-specific information is mentioned. This is largely a copy-and-paste from an anti-Blackberry rant I wrote on another forum, with a few modifications.

The email is the only thing that is even remotely good about it. And even then, I hate that it forces you to either copy the entire message into a reply or have nothing at all. Forget infix quoting. And I'm not really sure if it works as well when you don't have a Blackberry Enterprise Server pushing email to it, which you most likely wouldn't. (It might — I don't know, but I kinda doubt it. Why else would they have this server to push mail to you if just accessing an IMAP server worked fine?) All of your mail (and contacts and calendars) will be conglomerated into a single lump. AFAIK, there's no way to keep different accounts separated. (There is a GMail client. It seems to work pretty well.)

Some people say that you never have to reboot a Blackberry. Well, that's true. But only because it reboots itself all the time. Did it to me at least twice on Tuesday. But that's okay, because it only takes like 5 minutes (literally) for it to actually finish booting. Even better, sometimes it just shuts down and forgets to reboot, so that when you pull it out of your pocket, you get to start the 5 minute boot process right then. And every midlet I've ever downloaded that was not marked as specifically for the Blackberry causes the device to either lock up or reboot.

The UI is awful. The main UI is a grid of folders. Some of the default folders have decorations that fit with the UI. You can customize other folders, but none of the options fit the UI, and you can't even reuse the folders that already fit. In addition, you cannot put folders inside folders. Also, for a device that should clearly be icon-oriented, it seems oddly text-oriented. Sometimes it kinda feels like Netscape 0.9.

The available apps are almost universally poor, but at least they are few. The browser is putrid. It's slow and it seldom renders anything correctly. Opera exists for it, and while it seems to render a little better, it is far slower: unusably slow in most cases. There are some Google apps for it. Most of them are pretty good, and are definitely the best apps of any sort I've been able to find for the device. There are a few decent search applications, but they almost all end up using the default browser, so good luck with that last step of actually viewing the information you found.

The only apps I can even vaguely recommend are the Google apps, Boopsie (a universal search application that rewrites the results so that the browser can display them properly), and MidpSSH, a minimal secure shell client. A weather application would seem an obvious fit for the Blackberry, but the only one I've found is the one from The Weather Network (apparently the Canadian Weather Channel), and it's only just good enough to keep me from deleting it. (It's supposed to keep itself updated, but almost every time I go to use it, it spends at least 30 seconds downloading what can't possibly be more than a couple of kilobytes of data.)

The 8820 technically has WiFi, but it might as well not. If the device has any cellphone signal at all, regardless of strength or quality, it will prefer the cellphone internet connection over the WiFi connection. I frequently have to turn off the cellphone connection at hotspots so that I can do anything with the device at all. I have verified by multiple sources that there is no way to prefer the WiFi connection. The one advantage its WiFi has over many other portable devices is that it supports WPA-Enterprise.

That's all I can think of at the moment, but I'm sure there's much more. I have seldom disliked a device so much in my entire life.

Sold. Hopefully the hardware issue will be fixed by the time I'm up for my "upgrade".

Bitt, I agree with many of your gripes (I'm not a fan of the UI, and I don't even use the Blackberry's email client), but you make that rebooting behavior sound like it's a symptom of every Blackberry phone. My wife and I both have the curve and ours have never rebooted automatically. I won't deny that I haven't had to reboot it myself, but it hasn't been often. I do agree that it takes forever to start up.

Personally, I really dislike the 88xx Blackberry models. They're huge! The curve is nice and tiny, and it might not have some of the features of the 8800's but it's a great device.

Brad: in the end, I'll agree with everyone here. I wouldn't trust WiFi on the Blackberry, although the Bold should do that job much better (but it isn't out yet). I'd say get the iPhone or wait for something else.

I had my Blackberry replaced under warranty because the scrollball thingy stopped working. Both the original and the replacement both have had that same problem. YMMV.

A few more stories came up in this search..

FWIW, and a bit late to the thread, here are my thoughts on the (2G not 3G) Iphone I've recently replaced my Nokia 8890 with. First the pros:

• It's so nice having a screen that's hi-res enough to do proper typography on. The font looks really good.
• The kinematics of the scrolling is just lovely.
• The whoosh-in-and-out effects are lovely too, it's like having a hand-held version of Sonique.
• Actually the whole UI is basically really nice. I'm impressed how accurate the touchscreen is despite fat-fingered me using it.
• I haven't actually received one yet, but I bet it does "girl mode" (>160 byte) SMS much better than the 8890 did.
• It's very nice having Facebook on a phone, and I've just spent twenty minutes chortling at how cool Google Earth is.
• Although it's wider and taller than the 8890, it's thinner, which makes it fit pockets better.

and the cons:

• The vibrate doesn't seem as strong as the 8890's; I've missed a few texts since I got it. (Did I read somewhere that the 3G had a stronger vibrate?)
• When the screen is off it's off, which is fair enough for that sort of power consumption, but on the 8890 you could check the time, and whether you'd missed a call or message, by glancing at the phone without pressing a button. I can see a lot of "pull phone out of pocket, press button, glance at screen, press button again, put phone back in pocket" in my future.
• It's too easy to accidentally place a call by tapping a number. I've done that twice already, once to the Bahamas, whereas I never in 7 years accidentally placed a call on the 8890. If there were an option for a confirmation dialog, I'd turn that option on.
• I can't figure out how to get it to ask me for a password every time I connect to IMAP mail. Either I give it the password to keep, which I don't want to, or it says "Password incorrect" when I connect.
• Although having said that, I can't really use it for my main mail account anyway, as that feed is overwhelming without a spam filter. Really I should filter spam on the server, but I've got used to doing it in Evolution on the client.

Peter

Wouldn't it be soo cool if there was a way to replace the phone input pad with an old style dial? ...and sound effects! Think of it!
Shhhlick! nehnehnehnehneh!
Shhhlick! nehnehneh!
Shhhlllllick! nehnehnehnehnehnehnehneh!

Ooooo! So cool! Impress your friends!
Wow! Is this an original idea? Am I the first to think of this?

/yes?
//please?

I can't tell if you're joking. There are multiple apps that do that already.

Well- I should have know that I can't ever have any nice original ideas.

Hadn't seen one yet.
Hadn't looked.

That doesn't mean your idea was not original, but rather, that lots of other people came up with the same original (but obvious) idea.

Now if only patent examiners could understand that logic..

Here's a screen shot. The novelty wears off pretty quickly.

Isn't there a statute of limitations on being bitted around here?

Ok- forget the rotary dial.

How about a standard 12-button dialing pad that is at the *top* of the screen?
I don't understand the cellphone obsession with the low-input/high-output layout. Why not put the input where your thumb is?

[1][2][3]
[4][5][6]
[7][8][9]
[*][0][#]
[1-888-555-1212]

Seems like this would put the majority of the unit into your palm.

(Bear in mind that I do not own an iPhone and I'm posting purely for some mental diversion. I *did* try to search the app store a little, but it wasn't a pleasant experience, so I quit.)

Putting the output below the input in many UIs means that it can be obscured.

The iPhone's number pad dialer does however put huge numbers onto the screen similar to your textual illustration. That you can type into with your thumb.

You can see the stock dialer on the left and a payphone keypad mod on the right on this page: http://www.appleiphoneschool.com/2007/12/27/how-do-i-change-my-dialer/

Hmm...
I'm talking more about an ergonomic issue.
Say make the number pad smaller and position it at the top left, then. Or on the right side, if you usually hold the phone in the right hand to dial.