What a bunch of dishonesty. First, you bought the iPhone knowing you were going to return it. As you say, you bought it to review it. The article's header should read, "I Returned My iPhone Because I Cannot Afford It and I never Intended to Keep It." Of course, that would be a short article. Second, all the features you list as missing, were know to be missing before the device shipped. Accordingly, it is not a valid reason to suggest that is why you are returning it. Third, this whole "it doesn't have 3G thing" is a bogus complaint for most people because most people can and will use Wi-Fi most of the time. The only need for Edge is when Wi-Fi is not available. In those rare circumstance, is it really that big of a deal to wait 30 seconds for a page to load? Most people buying iPhones didn't even use data services before buying the phone.

Fourth, if you are buying a 3G phone, it will not be a model released after the iPhone was released. That is because there is a big patent feud going on right now over the technology. New model 3G phones are not being allowed in the country. I'd be pissed if I were an Apple shareholder and Apple intentionally included 3G when it know this patent issue has not been resolved. Last thing Apple wants to do is write another big check to a company like Creative.

man, you need to get out more. it's a phone. a PHONE.

It got marketed. Now I'm not saying it isn't interesting and great step forward, but for all the naysayers out there, what you're essentially complaining about is that Apple marketed the phone and put it in front of you. There are lots of high end phone like devices out there today from Nokia, HTC and others that are even more expensive, than the iPhone. Know why you've never heard of them? Because phone companies don't really market phones. They slap them up on their website.

The AT&T 8525 is one great bundle of electronics, feature-wise. But have you ever seen an ad for one? They list for $600. In fact most of the high end HTC phone like the Mogul, Wing, TyTN, PPCC 6700 and S720 are great. But they come in under the radar and the haters don't know about them. They spend zero in marketing.

So at the end of the day the problem people who have a problem with Apple is, is that the company spent a few hundred million dollars promoting it. (and sticking enough on board flash into it w/o making you go out and buy a uSD card.)

The reason people seem to hate Farhad is nicely summed up by the letter following yours by jakerome. He purports to be a tach writer, but doesn't seem to understand or know the technological world. He pissed a great many people off a few years ago by writing article after article insisting that tocuhscreen voting machines are perfectly fine and that there's no discrepencies anywhere at all and we should all just trust the election results 'cause the winners said they're fine.

I'm actually pleased he now has a blog instead of being a feature writer. This way I can read him. I just look at him as an everyday person who isn't very good with technology writing about how tech affects him. I don't expect him to get the details right, 'cause often he doesn't. I do expect him to write far more about his personal experiences and feelings instead of technical analysis and he does. I expect him to be blindsided by advertising and trends, like Apple products and he is.

If you read him this way and take his "technical expertise" with a grain of salt, like the kid that can set up grandma's computer out of the box, but couldn't swap out the video card to save his soul, then he can actually be an interesting read.

the strangest thing i noticed about the edge network performance is that it was really fast while i was on vacation in michigan last week. i think san francisco's at+t cell network is bottlenecked with too many users for the amount of bandwidth it supports - i download at a reasonable speed, then it chugs and hangs for a while, then gives another spurt, and back and forth, as if i'm taking turns having at the downloads.. it seems ridiculous that it can't even update the weather info correctly half of the time. in michigan pages loaded 10x faster and most of those other features (even youtube) worked well just with the edge stuff..

at least sf has wifi all over the place but really i think at&t just needs to get their act together and fix their infrastructure capacity problems. that, imho, is the biggest problem with this phone, along with dumb omissions of customization like letting me use my own ringtones.

i agree with the other poster that trying to cast it's price as over $2000 due to the contract is a misnomer. they never mention the $1200 or whatever discount you are getting when you cancel your old phone. for me it was only a slight increase per month and i would've been paying that anyway, except without as many minutes or unlimited data.

anyway, it's still better than my old ipod, better than my old digital camera (i didn't have one), and way better than my old cell phone, and i'm generally pretty happy with it.

If the really revolutionary thing about the iPhone is that you can have the internet where ever you go (as this article seems to claim), then the iPhone isn't revolutionary at all. There are tons of smart phones out there with internet access, a lot of them actually have 3G internet access. Hell, even my 3-year old LG 8100 non-smart phone has WAP internet access, which is good enough for looking up movies or recipes.

The iPhone is a stylish, sexy device with a nice interface, but it's evolutionary, not revolutionary. Just as the iPod is really just the best Walkman ever made, the iPhone is really just the best cell phone yet.