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" I have to agree. It is the most useful and indispensable electronic device I have ever owned. I have had no problems with bad reception except for one curve behind a hill on the road to my house."

Indispensible, is the word that comes to mind. I've had cell phones before, of course. This is a whole 'nother kind of appliance. Just incredibly useful.

And I recently jailbroke it. Tried it a couple months ago, had issues, restored from backup. Tried again last week: no problems this time. Now I can run any app in the background (ahhhhh... Pandora!) and have a few other cool utilities installed. I can ssh into it (warning: change your "root" and "mobile" passwords if you enable this!!!) and can vnc my iPhone's screen onto my computer and operate it with my mouse. Surprisingly handy-- means you can keep your iPhone in your pocket and operate it at your desk, talking via your Bluetooth headset. Too cool. I'm still getting used to this wild notion of having a powerful Unix computer in my pocket.

What a lot of people don't say out loud is that it's very much in Apple's best interest to facilitate the jailbreak community, maybe even encourage and participate in it via back-door channels. They can test a lot of fragile stuff on jailbreakers without support obligations. If something bricks a JBer's phone, he'll just shrug and regard it as a sporting injury. And Apple can test (and test-market) stuff with JBers that AT&T would get all stompy about. Tethering is an obvious example; a less-obvious one would be Flash. If you've ever wondered why hotel WiFi networks get boggy and unusable in the evenings, it's because of all the residents watching movies and surfing for porn or whatever the hell they do. Most of that stuff is Flash based. Flash is the network's nightmare, then. That (and not footprint or battery life) is the real reason, I'm convinced, that Flash is not yet out for the iPhone. I expect you'll find a leaked version of Flash for the iPhone in some Cydia repo in a couple of months, as the horizon for AT&T's exclusivity approaches.