Speaking of screen brightness and battery life, have you noticed that the brightness of the screen adjusts dynamically to the ambient light level? I didn't notice it until I was reading an e-mail while walking up out of a subway station onto a brightly lit street. Wow.

It's also worth noting that while my experience is limited (I tend to buy one phone and stick with it; I've owned four in ten years) this screen is the only one I've found perfectly usable in all light levels from pitch darkness to full-on direct sunlight.

I have noticed that, but forgot to mention it. Also, at 163DPI, the screen is more than twice as sharp as most laptops, and more than half the sharpness of the best glossy magazine covers. Outstanding display, just outstanding.

That sound you just heard is the jealous in my little heart. It's very noisy jealousy.

Must get iPhone...

Hey Steve. Make sure AllahPundit doesn't hear about this. He's been pining for an iPhone for years, it seems like!

Nice review. You've managed to hit on the high points pretty solidly. I think the only thing left to find out about these is the durability. There are some rumors going about that the screen loses its sensitivity after a while, but there's no consistency to the reporting.

The one thing I'm curious about is EDGE speed in your area. Lots of people noticed a serious uptick in EDGE speed a few days before the iPhone was released in June. I have noticed (in the Baltimore/DC area) that sometimes the EDGE network flies (relatively speaking) and sometimes it is dog-slow. Is it always slow for you?

Mostly I use Wi-Fi, so EDGE speeds haven't been an issue. One afternoon, I took out the iPhone's password to my home network and forced it to rely on EDGE. Speeds up here aren't great -- but we're at 7,500 feet, and generic cell coverage is pretty spotty.

I'll play with it in town some more, next time I need to drive down the hill for something.

EDGE speeds are far more variable than I expected them to be. When it's fast it is plenty usable for blog browsing and even some more complicated sites (HTML only of course). When it's slow, it... sucks.

Almost thou persuadest me...

Here in Manhattan, I'm consistently getting around 200 kbits/sec, which is about 4x modem speed. It's not broadband, but it's certainly usable. I love my iPhone...

For me the Edge network speed varies during the day while I remain in the same spot (at work). Otherwise I'm having a lot of fun with the iPhone, and I'm not usually seduced by the latest cell phone full of gadgets. Maybe AT&T and Apple will upgrade to GSM.

The essential problem with the iPhone is that it's an Apple product. Definitionally, it is complete crap which has been gussied with a pretty front end and a slick marketing campaign.

Next year Steve Jobs will stand up again at MacWorld, talk like he's taking responsibility for all the problems consumers have experienced with the gen-2 iPhone, and offer completely-insulting compensation in the form of a discount on the gen-3 iPhone -- which is gonna work properly for sure this time, honest! -- or other Apple products. Those of us who've seen this act about a zillion times before will be standing on the sidelines laughing at the dolts who fell for it, again.

iPhone is fun and addictive and surely the best consumer electronics product I've ever used, bar none. Sure, it has its faults, just like any other device, but the sheer charm of the device powers past any problems.

I'm with you - I hate cellphones but I love iPhone. This is probably because mobile web browsing is really slick and fun, and mobile email reading is too. If you're an Internet addict like me and most bloggers, you won't regret getting iPhone and even the $600 original price will look negligible next to the benefits you get from it.

EDGE rates do vary enormously from place to place, from unusable to hey, this is almost as fast as WiFi. The phone makes excellent use of the connection - if you're looking for text, chances are it will load fast and then you'll see any images pop up while you're reading the page.

What did strike me, though, is that I sat next to someone with a Blackberry that had an allegedly state of the art 3G connection and it actually loaded sites slower than my iPhone on EDGE. I can only conclude that there's some serious CPU/graphics power in that thing.

I'd say that if you read or write in blogs, well, you'll get more than your money's worth out of iPhone.

D

I have the Sprint Mogul, which is a rework of the HTC 6800. Having used the Pocket PC / Windows Mobile device and the iPhone, the only thing that I liked about the iPhone was the rotating display. Otherwise, if I were to try and use the iPhone in my work environment, I'd probably destroy it in about 2 days.

Kevin,

I'm not so sure about your worries on that last point. I abuse the heck out of my iPhone. It usually gets thrown into the center console of my Wrangler - which is bare metal, no carpeting or leather. It shares room in there with an iPod, some lens caps, the occasional camera lens and/or camera - a bunch of sharp pointy stuff, basically.

And I thrash that Wrangler around with all that stuff in there.

So far, there's not a scratch on the iPhone.

Thanks for your personal reply, I shall endeavor to frequent your blog more often.

The environment I work in is an aircraft manufacturing environment.

Follow the link below to see a picture of one of the area's I must go into, and which my phone needs a reasonable expectation of survival if dropped.
http://www.viewimages.com/Search.aspx?mid=51187612&epmid=1&partner=Google

It's steel and concrete.

It's unforgiving.

Hi Stephen,

When you mention the $80 family plan, is that the same as the $110 700-minute family plan? ($80 + $30 for the second iPhone line.) If so, too bad...

Anyway, thanks for the review. You've almost convinced us to pick up a couple of iPhones.

-Matt

Steve,

Regardless of iPhone ownage (iPhonage), all Mac users need to check out CallWave and their widgets.

http://www.callwave.com/landing/widgets.asp

One widget allows you to send text messages from your Mac to anyone's cell phone. IOW, using a real keyboard.

The second one is called visual voicemail. It dumps a text version of your actual voicemail into your cell phone's text message inbox. It is limited in that it doesn't necessarily do the whole message if it's too long. Also, accuracy is somewhat dependent upon the speaker - there is room for improvement there! However, it is very useful for screening your voicemail messages.

And both are free downloads and free services!

Just noticed that there are versions of the above for other operating systems as well.

You've done more with yours in a week than I've done in a month and a half. I haven't even bothered to program a voice message for missed calls yet: Haven't even bothered to look and see how to do it. Then again, I'm single, and I don't care.

I just like not having to carry a cell phone, a digital camera, an iPod, and an iBook with me everywhere I go. That's a lot of crap to cram into a phone!

The daily carry-cam the iPhone replaced for me is an ancient 1.3 mega pixel Canon PowerShot A10, so the iPhone's camera is actually a pretty significant improvement, except for not having a flash (I just leave the A10 and a four-pack of AA's in the glove box of my pickup truck, and it's there if I need it).

I find surfing on it to be fairly tedious: Even with a WiFi hotspot handy, it's really not much faster than a dialup connection, for some reason, but I can check the weather and my blog stats, which is about all I need it to do.

My favorite feature is the babe-magnet factor: I check my email at the bar during my gig breaks, and they are just powerless to resist the iPhone's sexiness. Makes 'em not motice my lack of same.

The biggest shortcoming of the email app is that there is no way to select all of the messages and delete them. That seems like a pretty huge oversight error to me, but then I may just not know how to do it: Deleating fifty-plus junk messages one at a time - when the thing chokes every ten or so until it catches up - is basically inexcusable.

The iPod's album browse window is also as useless as tits on a boar hog: Most of my MP3's were created before album artwork was associated with such files, so it's just a bunch of anonamous grey eighth-note duplets in mine.

What shall I buy with my $100.00 Apple Store Credit?

And another thing:

The iPhone DOES NOT sync with MacMail: I have to delete EVERYTHING from the iPhone AND MacMail... every. fracking. time.

You also cannot empty Trash on the iPhone: You have to deleat every email individually from the trash: This is beyond idiotic. This means you have to delete EVERY received email TWICE and every sent email TWICE... one. at. a. time.

Other than that, the iPhone's mail app works like a chump... er, champ.

Seriously, I'm not nearly as impressed with it as you are. I give it two out of five stars.