you can email photos all day long, if you want to send or recieve multimedia text messages well your SOL.

I find it hard to believe that AT&T wouldn't offer the phone with a rebate instead of a subsidy. As it is you do all the work of activating the phone using iTunes and not in the store. The possibility of a rebate means that quite a few people will buy the phone fully intending to send all the paperwork in for the rebate and yet still forgetting or inevitably screwing up even the most foolproof process. This would allow AT&T to stimulate sales across all venues of distribution while allowing the opportunity to pick up more users... which is ultimately the reason the phone is locked to their network in the first place.

You can bet your bottom dollar that round 2 of the phone is going to be hardware locked and software locked against folks trying to hack it for other GSM networks. Although I'm not sure how they plan on keeping the euro versions from hitting the grey market and getting imported back into the states.

I pay about 70 dollars a month. Thats the cheapest calling plan (loving the rollover minutes), unlimited data, nights and weekends at 7p, with all the call service bells and whistles, SMS plan, state taxes, anti-terrorism fund, 911 surcharge, the tax fee, the fee fee and a bunch of other crap, it works out to about 90 a month. Every month, like clockwork. Since I work an office job, I just switch over to my skype phone during the day and only use my celly for personal calls outside the office on lunch and afterhours. I've got *PLENTY* of minutes in rollover.

Having spent upwards of $350 a month on unlimited voice only plans before I'd have to say I'm plenty happy with the plan I have now, and I'm glad our phones are finally catching up with what they've had in Europe for about a decade now.

Edge network is blazingly slow for surfing, but works decent enough keeping my email updated. And the fact I can look at real attachments without some hokey 3rd party software is keen. Luckily in the city some folks are still considerate enough to leave some wireless open so war walking is still possible. I have a spare wireless router in my DMZ just for that purpose.

Anyways good luck and happy podding!