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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.

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.

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.

I don't have any real interest in the history of Verizon or AT&Ts 3G roll-out at the end of 2006 nearly a year before the first I-phone was released. My PPC-6700 was a Sprint phone and they started their 3G roll-out before both Cingular/AT&T or Verizon. By the time that I purchased my 3G PPC-6700 3G was working well in both the Seattle Tacoma area and in Portland. Sprint was also a leader in 4G deployment. By the time the first I-phone came out they were already working on upgrading many markets to WiMax 4G.

From 2006 http://www.zdnet.com/article/sprint-nextel-announce-4g-data-network/

My brother told me that he was getting good 3G service on his laptop dongle from Verizon at most of the airports he stayed over at across the country. This was in 2007 before the first I-phone came out.

What you got with the first I-phone was a phone that would not do 3G, and had a processor that was approximately the same speed as the PPC-6700 that came out nearly 2 years before and not nearly as many user accessible features. What you got for $600 and a two year contract was a screen that was about half an inch bigger and a gimmicky new form of touch screen that sorry... is not nearly as precise as a resistive touch screen. Oh and you are suppose to be able to type on the screen that you are trying to look at? Yeah sure... I bet that was a non-bias survey.

I guess Apple is who we can blame for the last ten years of texts and posts with bizarre auto spell check errors. I don't doubt that on-screen keyboards are almost as usable as tiny blackberry keyboards etc. but the slide out keyboard that came on the PPC-6700 was vastly superior to the touch screen of the first I-phone. To me it was worth the extra thickness.

The truth is I am not that fond of multi-touch... sorry. I generally turn multi-touch and “tapping” off on any laptop touch pad that I am using. Even on a phone or tablet it often gets in the way and causes unusual behavior. If this type of sensor is so much more accurate then why do the drawing pads that I use for making selections and drawing in photoshop and other graphics and 3d modeling programs still use a stylus? From your description you would think that using a bunch of our fat all at the same time would be more accurate.