I did a speed test on EDGE and got 185 kbps, which is livable for things like e-mail, weather and traffic. It’d be a lot more livable for web browsing if I could get some sort of ad blocker CSS file shoehorned into the phone — which should be possible nowadays with all of those hacking tools everywhere.

One of my coworkers has an iPhone too. Every time we go out for lunch at a sit-down restaurant we check for free WiFi. The list of positives so far is: Old Chicago, Keys Cafe, Joe Senser’s, Hardees, Granite City Food and Brewery, with an honorable mention for our local Quiznos which is next door to a computer store with open WiFi. At any of those places we get typical WiFi speeds, which is quite usable.

YouTube is awesome for killing time while waiting for food to arrive, which is a little bit sad, actually. It is nice to instantly fire up a video clip of the guy completing the final stage in Ninja Warrior right there at the table instead of waiting to get back to the office or e-mailing a link so someone can watch it hours later.

As far as phone calls are concerned, I have made a few. The “lifetime” call minutes on the phone, after a month and a half, are … 29 minutes.

In contrast to that, in just the last 30 minutes I’ve used it for 20 minutes; most of it on YouTube. It’s like having a small TV in your pocket.

Yesterday the usage on the phone was about 4 hours, over an 18 hour period (since the last charge). That didn’t quite get it down to 1/2 capacity on the battery. Lots of web surfing in there and random traffic/weather checks, along with the calendar (I actually have a current calendar of my meetings in my pocket, which is just crazy talk), stocks, and e-mail. I use it many times throughout the day and do a surprising amount of web surfing on it even though I have a laptop because the iPhone is almost always within an arm’s reach.

The voice minutes cost $40 and the unlimited internet is $20 but I like to think that I’m paying $40 for a portable internet appliance and $20 for phone calls. I use the non-voice parts of it for about 100 hours a month so that’s a good deal

Plus the AT&T signal is better at my apartment than the T-Mobile signal ever was, so I’m coming out ahead on that. Also, my old phone was from the land before polyphonic ringers — so an iPhone is about the biggest upgrade you can imagine.

I’ve heard nothing good about Edge.

The iphone is pretty cool for everything but phone calls. Reasonably impressed by the interface. Very well done. Needs to be more grippy and not use AT&T to be worthwhile phone wise.