So who bought an iPhone today?

And it is launched in France later this month, where selling mobile phones that are locked to a network is illegal. So no doubt they'll be charging more than elsewhere.

If the iPhone had shipped with 3G you'd have about one hour of battery life. And there would be far more complains. I don't have any problem believing greater than 90% of iPhone buyers don't have a clue what 3G is nor why they'd want it. There's a lot to complain about with the iPhone. Lack of 3G on the first revision isn't one of those things in my opinion.

The SDK was planned all along. I can't say if February was always the intention, but plans have always existed to bring it out at some point.

Personally, I'm waiting to see what they come out with as an update. I'm without a cell phone now and don't have any plans to get back on the grid until next year anyway. Hopefully the class-action suit against all Canadian carriers will have settled out by then as well (they're all ripping off customers with a $7-9 charge per month, on top of the advertised plan price, that they have falsified as a government surcharge or licensing fee for the past 10 to 15 years).

I'm also hoping Apple get in bed with the FON guys and that concept really takes off. I don't think I will ever use the carrier's data plans.

North America is probably 5 to 10 years behind Europe when it comes to technology adoption in many sectors, not just telecom.

Bear in mind that "up to" figures are very misleading, especially for talktime. You really want to know what the *worst-case* talktimes are for 2G and 3G. If you look around you'll see that many 3G phones sport little more than 90 minutes worst-case talktime, but still manage several hours of worst-case 2G.

Of course, it's very much network dependent as to what talktime you get. Here in the US, there are waaaay fewer cells than in europe, so phones tend to use higher output power more often. Still, my old 6680 used to really burn through battery when it sat on 3G cells compared to forcing it to 2G. Dave English couldn't video call me then though, but that only ever happened twice

Hugo

I used my Treo with EV-DO constantly. It had Good software installed which meant it was almost always going out to check for new mail. I had a weather application updated every half hour. I checked my GMail on it, which meant a lot of time spent on the browser. I was always going to Wikipedia on it to answer questions that came up in every day conversation. I even talked on it from time to time

I charged it every night, and never once had it die on me while I was using it.

I guess that even the term "talk time" is starting to become misleading. Presumably phones nowadays use a similar amount of power when transferring data as they do when you are on a call. So what does talk time actually mean now.

what is the battery life for just surfing the Internet? Does the auto backlight help for battery life?

Yes, data is often similar to talk - except when the data flow stops, so does most (sometimes nearly all) of the power consumption. Actually, this happens with voice calls if DTX - discontiguous transmission - is enabled by the network - if you're not talking (and the background is quiet) then it won't bother transmitting. A big power-saver when talking to your mother*

Hugo

* Obviously not my mother!

Backlights tend to be very power hungry, yes. The bigger/brighter the screen, the worse the problem... but when you're browsing the web, the CPU power to render pages isn't negligible either.

Hugo