Once again Swordmaker, you are making it up as you go along. 3G was available in every major market long before the first I-phone was released. 3G was available in 2006 in the Tacoma-Seattle and Portland areas and down the I-5 corridor between them. I know because that is where I used it. I also was able to use 3G on a trip to Florida and the Midwest during that time period. My brother is an airline pilot; he used his Verizon 3G laptop dongle all over the country long before the first I-phone was released. Maybe you could explain to him how we wasn't actually able to use the service he subscribed to. You are just making stuff up while trying to sound authoritative and it is all BS.
As far as your other comments about the PPC-6700s limitations... you are an ignorant fool who never actually used one. The HTC-6700 had a following after it came out and it was very easy to customize. You didn't have to "root" or "jailbreak" or anything else. Users had access to every folder on the device and could easily customize the ROM to improve their performance. I have a good friend who has always loved everything Apple. He bought the first I-phone. It was a laugh when we got together so he could show it off. It simply did not have the features that I relied upon at that time. Most notable was the lack of high speed Internet access and the ability to tether to a laptop; it also wouldn't work with my Bluetooth GPS sender. It was not useful for sending and receiving emails let alone composing them; it wasn't useful for browsing the Internet. You couldn't look over a word document. At this point I can't remember why he thought it was worth buying in the first place. Maybe you can explain to us all... all the great stuff a first generation I-phone was capable of. As far as I was concerned at the time it was a pretty good looking "feature phone" that was missing nearly everything that I used a "smart phone for.
But we have been through all of this before, haven't we. You are simply pretending to be ignorant to make your arguments in front of others who really do not know and will never bother to try and verify. Your rewriting of history on behalf of Apple is still annoying to me when you go completely off the reservation. Stick to what you know... and don't try to tell those of us who have a lot of experience with other devices what they were capable of.
Indeed it was. As a ATT iPhone user I had a strong signal from Seattle to LA, then all the way to Phoenix. Only exception was the most remote areas of the desert where there was probably no signal of any kind. I was quite shocked by that considering all the press about how bad it supposed to be.
No, fireman, I am NOT "making it all up." Here is a map comparing the 3G roll-out at the end of 2006 between Verizon and AT&T.
As I said, The coverage of 3G was essentially in a few large urban centers. AT&T certainly did not have full 3G coverage along the I5 corridor. . . 2G was the essential standard across the country. Verizon, the first carrier to start rolling out 3G had much better coverage since they started in 2002, but Apple's contract was exclusive with AT&T/Cingular for five years, so there was very little need for 3G until there was greater coverage.
AT&T did not get serious about 3G until 2008. I recall driving across the South Western US with my iPhone 3G, going through Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and up through the Mojave desert and losing AT&T 3G only for about 5 minutes on that entire trip. . . with it tethered to my MacBook.