Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.

tl;dr: It's great at its core competencies: voice and email are great. Everything else is a bit unfinished.

The bottom line is that so far it's good enough for what I use it for. I'm still crap at the keyboard but getting better, the EVDO is fast enough but not spectacular, the roller ball works well almost all of the time but the horizontal sensitivity seems a bit wonky sometimes, I haven't figured out why yet. (There's no way I'm that bad at brickbreaker so I choose to blame RIM)

Email integration is about 8/10, I push email from my gmail account and Exchange at work to it and that workflow is very well executed. However, reading mail on Gmail or Outlook doesn't mark the messages read on the blackberry. It's possible I'm doing something wrong here and I'm not on a BES but it hasn't annoyed me enough yet to really dig for a solution. Also Gmail IMAP sync doesn't respect your filters/tags so if you get new mail it all hits your blackberry. I ended up unsubscribing to a few mailing lists that I never really read anyway because they were just too high traffic to be buzzing me all the time.

There seems to be a bit of a compatibility issue with the Tour and the Storm, most apps that require unrestricted TCP access don't seem to work [1]. I can't get jmirc, midpssh etc to connect, they just die with "Invalid URL parameter." It'll be fixed at some point I'm sure but for now there's nothing app-wise that's useful to me. Viigo is acceptable as a podcast client but not much else. Google Voice client is alright, doesn't integrate as well as I'd like but it's workable. AIM works well, Flickr works well. The apps in the app store are great if you're obsessed about a) the weather b) financial news c) sports scores or d) playing card games, outside of that there's not much there. Then again every "must have app" my iPhone friends show me has me rolling my eyes so I suppose I'm just not the target market.

The voice quality is top notch. I was on a four hour conference call last night and I set the speakerphone up and forgot about it, no issues either hearing or being heard. That took my battery life down from full to about half. The camera is frankly barely adequate. Plenty of pixels but too much grain. [2]

All that said I'm buying my wife one to replace her free-and-worth-every-penny phone in a few weeks so it's safe to say I'm pleased with it. The warts just aren't in places I care about.

[1] http://forums.crackberry.com/f35/tour-9630-irc-266165/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/skorgu/3737195762/

The "invalid URL parameter" can be solved in midpssh by switching the connection to TCP/IP instead of Auto. I haven't found a solution for jmirc yet but of course I can ssh to a box running irssi.

A few more observations: the trackball responds better to a very light touch, pushing down even slightly seems to affect its resolution horizontally. I didn't notice this on a co-worker's Bold but it may change with age.

Also last night it silently stopped receiving mail. I came into the office to 97 unread messages that were never pushed. Forcing a reconcile didn't find them but pulling the battery did. If this happens again there will be a chat with Verizon and/or RIM in my future.

There's a small flaw with the headset socket, it appears to be slightly too deep. Pushing headphones in all the way doesn't work, you have to pull them out just a tick. Which is useless as then they get knocked back into place when a gnat farts in the next zipcode. The included headset does work but it's crap. I picked up a set of bluetooth A2DP earphones [1] which are frankly only adequate.

[1] http://www.plantronics.com/north_america/en_US/products/mobi...

Months later, AT&T set up a single TDMA tower in my area. Because AT&T phones were service provider locked, my phone and hundreds of others like it were forced to use that single tower. Overnight my phone went from having perfect signal everywhere I went, to just short of useless.

Every single AT&T representative that I talked to swore up and down that the reason I was getting poor service was not their fault, that the problem was with my phone and that I should get a new phone.

Since this happened just as AT&T was moving from TDMA to GSM, I am guessing that this was their way of forcing their customers to move to GSM. I can understand the business case for moving customers to GSM, what I can't understand is why AT&T would do so by using trickery and lies.

I will always remember AT&T's shady tactics and blatant deceit and will never give them another cent of my money - I will purchase an iPhone the second it is officially available on another provider.

Of course, if you know the magic phone number, you can call the dry loop division directly, and they are as helpful as can be. I asked one once why they were so hidden... she answered: politics.

1-800-264-0002

But you might want to do a bit of research before signing up:

Get AT&T Dry Loop/Naked DSL In 5 Minutes http://consumerist.com/342490/

AT&T Dry Loop DSL Hard To Find, Get And Cancel http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Dry-Loop-DSL-Hard-To-...

That is exactly the number I have. I was told it's for the region that includes Texas, but like you say, they can forward you on where you need to go, and the people at that number tend to actually be helpful.

I'd like to comment on that. I live in a city in which AT&T started a test of bandwidth caps. Depending on your connection type, you can download anywhere from 5 gigs to 60 gigs, and it's $1 per gig after your limit.

I watch HD video, stream music, download games from steam and software from the apt repositories, etc etc, and I've used 50 gigs this month.

Sadly, the only other ISP in town is Charter, and they have notoriously bad service in my area.

I've had an iPhone on AT&T for 2 years without any issues. No dropped calls or billing mistakes and no issues with customer service. The rates that they charge are nearly identical to the other wireless providers for voice + data.

I'm not saying that AT&T has not had these problems, but your comment does not exemplify the experiences of the majority of their customers.