> Also, the Blackberry was actually useful as a phone. IIRC the iPhones could barely make phone calls until the iPhone 4.

I used mine from a couple months after release until the 4S came out and have no experience supporting that - it was equivalent quality to any other phone I used during that period (pre-VoLTE). The main source of problems was AT&T's network but that affected all phones since it was do to them having massively underprovisioned their network.

I found that, at least where I was, it would take 45-60 seconds to place a call or fail trying. Yes, this was AT&T, and yes they had problems, but it was also in large part Apple’s fault. I had a chance to sit down with actual network engineers from AT&T’s local network contractor, and the story I got was that the iPhone generated much more signaling traffic than it should have, so it worked much worse than it should have. Certainly my old Blackberry could place calls easily on the same network in the same location.

(IIRC the iPhone issue was hypothesized to be related to an incorrect GSM power management implementation.)

That happened a lot, but also on every other model phone — AT&T had dramatically underprovisioned their network and 2G and 3G were less efficient at connection setup and supported fewer clients as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to blame the phone hardware but given every other interaction with that company I would default to assuming someone got a bonus for “saving” money on network capacity and then had to play damage control for a couple of years. My previous phone only had sound quality as good as the iPhone because I had unlocked it and enabled the higher-bitrate standard GSM codecs which AT&T's default policy had disabled.

It worked fine so long as you didn't hold it wrong...