And the battery life on the new iPhone will also be one of major concerns if I want to buy the new phone.

Well well, the mighty iPhone. You say the Att 3g sucks, I say you must have never owned a device like the Blackjack II or Tilt. I agree people shouldn’t buy an iPhone 3G, but I don’t think they should buy or keep an Original iPhone either.
1. My 3g is pretty much everywhere, don’t forget that the iPhone 3g has reception issues. Don’t blame Att for your problems blame Apple. If you put an iPhone 3g next to a Blackjack II and run speedtests, you’ll probably get the same speed or near the same, but benchmarks are useless, as they run different browsers, so in practice, as much as I hate Pocket IE, it still loads faster than Safari under 3g. I have no qualms about Att’s 3g network, and I live in the SF Bay Area, as a matter of fact I work in Stonestown Mall in SF. When I was downtown I had nothing but super speedy browsing and Google Maps ran smoothly with no waiting for the map to load when it followed me on GPS, this is on a Blackjack II, I had a similar experience with my Tilt. Try an aircard on Att, and run it on your Macbook, it will be just as fast to load the flikr page, as I said, its not the network, its the device, your phone is not a computer, the iphone is a 624mhz arm processor, your Macbook is probably well over 1ghz, probably double the processing speed, you can throw down a 3.6mbps connection but if you run a pentium 2 behind it its gonna be slow. its like saying Comcast is better because you can get a faster download, but in practice, most servers cannot deliver the content as fast as you can recieve it. also, I use my bjii as a modem and its way quicker than on device, because of how the phone renders the page. Get a WM phone and get Skyfire if you want fast phone browsing with a ‘desktop style’ browsing experience. Because skyfire’s servers do the legwork, you get a much faster pageload.

2. As for battery both my BJII and my Tilt got about 2 full days of use with regular browsing. Steveo boy probably wanted to prove a point about his original thought of 3g, battery problems.

3. Use the wifi, I love wifi, but 3g is as fast usually due to processor speed, my Tilt maxed out on device at 1.5mbps on wifi, regardless of internet speed. the processor is a 400mhz Qualcomm dual core, still slow but one of the fastest in the US. I can’t wait until Windows Mobile phones start using the 624 Arms, then they’ll really blow the iPhone out of the water.

4. The SMS was never free, it was just bundled, for $15 a month you could get no sms.

5. As for the $30 data plan, yes its a tad expensive, but tell me where you’re going get that kind of mobility with internet for less, Verizon charges the same for PDAs, $29.99 a month, Sprint charges less, but they don’t have the network or the customer base of VZW or ATT, both with over 70 million customers, that’s about 2x the mobile to mobile, and the Bay Area has a huge ATT customer base, so you’ll spend more for minutes at sprint. You pay the same but you pay less for data and more for minutes.

Couple all of your reasons, then throw in the lack of A2DP, OBEX, and office productivity applications it’s a joke that this thing is called a smartphone. My opinion is semi biased, as I work for an Att authorized retailer, and Steve Jobs thinks I’m shady because of that, I refuse to buy Apple products for that reason. I will boycott Apple until we are allowed to sell their products in our stores. The iPhone has a nice UI, that’s about the extent of its revolutions. Apple products are grossly overpriced, and the iPhone is no exception. A comparable PC is about 2/3 the price of an Apple machine.

Sincerely,

Pac-Sun.

1. in san francisco i am getting 3G connectivity easily 90% of the time. sometimes it's a weak signal, but it's still there.

2. 3G is FAST. i'm almost tempted to say there's something wrong with your phone if you see no difference from EDGE. it is simply not true. 3G loads pages almost as fast as wifi – including picture-heavy sites like flickr.

3. my battery life has been almost exactly the same as my 1st gen iPhone. i do all the tricks — turning brightness all the way down, turning wifi and bluetooth off unless i need them, etc. and i'm able to get almost 2 days of normal use (push email, web browsing a bit, SMS, etc.).

i'll agree with your last two points – the difference in the plans sucks, but i understand the increase since AT&T; is subsidizing so much of the cost of the phone. and zero SMS just blows.

however, to your 3rd point about wifi – i do think it will become more and more ubiquitous over the next few years, but what does that do for me now? as i said, my experience with 3G in both SFO and SLC has been extremely fast and pretty darn awesome. what good does it do to talk about "the next few years" — hell, it was only a year between iPhone classic and 3G.

anyhoo, if you're just going to turn off 3G i would definitely tell you to not upgrade. but there's no reason to, IMHO. the firmware is causing the battery life issues, and hopefully they'll fix that over time. for now, all the basic hacks are working and giving me a solid day and a half of battery life.

but to each her own…

I must say that I changed from an opld iPhone to a new one without changing my provider contract ! … It’s not an Apple stuff.

Concerning the battery life topic, you’d better try to adjust secreen brightness, desactivate 3G and «push»… well : manage your options to save some energy.
Moreover, if you are spending so energy surfing on internet, that’s because it’s so EASY to surf with an iPhone, much more than with another smartphone…
To sum up : try your new iPhone in Europa : have some hollidays