The call quality on the iPhone seems much better than on previous smartphones I've used (almost exclusively Treos), and callers complain about my voice quality far less then they used to. I can't compare to Blackberries since I haven't owned any. I'm willing to believe that Palm's handset design was poor, although I did own every Sprint model that came out for several years (300, 600, 650, 700) and you'd think they'd have fixed it if call quality was that bad.

My understanding is that 3G (UMTS/HSDPA) and EDGE/GSM are two different networks running in parallel. If the 3G network is overloaded with iPhones, then older/cheaper phones that only use 2.5G should (in my understanding) work better. This theory could be tested if iPhone owners tried disabling 3G, but I don't know if that's a widely-tested theory.

I don't know if the overloaded 3G network is the entire problem with the iPhone - maybe it's combined with a poor ability to handle an overcrowded network. I can say that I live in Western NY (Rochester) and do not see any of the problems people/articles report. I drop calls maybe once every two weeks, I've only missed calls due to reception problems and have never had problems with missing/failed text messages. (I have had some occasional Visual Voicemail issues, however.)

I have, however, had all those problems when going to conferences in much larger cities, and those conferences have had very high proportions of iPhone users.

It's a tricky problem, because Apple chooses their partner carriers and their reputation is coupled to the carrier's experience. Apple wants to sell as many phones as possible, but that seems to quickly overload the carrier network in many areas and leaves an impression of the device not working well. I wonder if this would be less of a problem if Apple chose to only sell unlocked phones and not partner with carriers, but then the iPhone wouldn't be the success it is today.