...has anyone ever thought to question the iphone itself…ive been a bb user and my bold 9000 and my new 9700 blackberrieshave never suffered drop calls or slow data speeds…it must be disappointing to be a mac head!

Before my iPhone I had a Razr. I never used it for data, but dropped calls were normal. There was a problem with early Razr’s and a firmware update fixed it, but the dropped called never went away.

I know BB and HTC users who complain of slow data speeds and dropped calls, so I don’t believe it’s exclusive to the iPhone. iPhone users tend to be a more vocal group because they expect things to work. I’ve seen BB users wait, and wait for screen updates. I can get to the Internet faster than BB users can on the same network. I’ve done it many times and it is noticeably faster access on the iPhone. When it works.

Also, I would question whether you’ve NEVER suffered dropped calls or slow data speeds. Everyone experiences it at one time or another if they use their devices.

I suppose if you are use to something being bad then you’d never really know what good is.

Vern Seward

I have never had any problems whatsoever anywhere in Florida (including both the agricultural interior or the Southwest Florida barrier islands) with AT&T (or Cingular, as it was briefly known) with dropped calls from either my iPhone or my previous RAZR. I live in the greater Orlando area.

Then count yourself as one of the lucky ones. My Razr was a decent phone, much better than the freebie phone I had before, but I did get dropped calls. I’d say 10% of the calls got dropped with the Razr. I get about that, maybe a tad less, with the iPhone. With the iPhone, however, it tells you that the call dropped (“call failed” error message) whereas with the Razr I don’t think it gave a message.

Further, there are times when service gets inexplicably bad, not just for me but everyone on my area. This happened again week before last (can’t remember the exact day) and it was the worst “brown out” so far.

What happens is that you may or may not get bars, but 3G disappears and only Edge is available, and even Edge won’t connect you to the Net. This last one the bars varied from none to 3 during the brown out when I normally have 4 to 5 bars, so any call I tried to make during that time was crappy or never connected.

It cleared up at noon that same day and in fact has been somewhat better since. I’ve only had 2 dropped calls and always have 3G now.

I also had SMS strangeness where I could not text some people while I could others. I called AT&T and got 2 level support who reset something in my phone’s profile and now SMS works. The SMS thing might have gone bad the same time the Brown Out occurred, but I can’t be sure.

I was not the only affected by that Brown out, BTW, friends and co-workers on AT&T with iPhones and other phones had problems as well, and it cleared up at the same time.

I believe AT&T is working on fixing their infrastructure, which is a good thing.

So, if you’ve never had a problem then you are indeed lucky.

Vern Seward