So I’ve had my iPhone for about two weeks now and absolutely love it. I moved from Verizon with a BlackBerry 8703e to AT&T with the iPhone. Here’s what I’ve found after using it for personal and business use for the past two weeks. Be warned, this could take a while.

The reception is great with AT&T. I have signal everywhere and more than with Verizon. I had a few issues where I live with some dead zones with Verizon, and I now have signal in most of those with AT&T. There’s no places where I had signal before and don’t now, which is great.

The EDGE speed has been widely discussed as slow. I’m not going to lie, it isn’t blazing fast. Coming from an EVDO device with Verizon, I was expecting it to be brutal, and it’s really not. It’s not that much slower than the EVDO I had for mobile browsing. I’m sure tethering would be a different story, but that’s not an issue for me. For email, EDGE is plenty fast. For web browsing, it’s not the best, but does the job when you need to. Google Maps over EDGE isn’t that bad either. I was honestly expecting a lot worse.

The way to combat the EDGE speed was to include WiFi, and Apple made it very easy to work with on the iPhone. If you’re in range of a wireless network, the iPhone will prompt you to join. Once you join, that network is added to your preferred network list and the iPhone will automatically join when in range. This helps a lot when you’re home or at the office where there’s a WiFi signal.

Call quality is good; not exceptional, but good. GSM has a distinct sound that is different than CDMA. Some prefer one over the other and I’m somewhere in the middle. My real issue with the call quality is the volume level of the iPhone’s ear piece, which is pretty low. I almost always have the volume turned all the way up to hear the caller. In loud places like a bar or sporting event, it can become tough to hear who you’re talking to. Speaker phone is almost the same with the volume issues. What’s puzzling is that playing music through the same speaker is much louder than any in-call volume. I’m guessing this is something Apple will fix in a software update, since pretty much everyone is complaining about it.

The Phone application has a few options when you go in. You can setup a favorites list, which acts like your speed dial. I like this a lot better than standard speed dial, since I would never remember what speed dials I setup past the first 3. This way, I hit Phone and then tap the number I want to call. Much easier than trying to remember who was speed dial 6 through 9. The Visual Voicemail is probably the best thing to happen to a phone since voicemail was invented. Not having to dial in and listen through every message is such a pleasure. Since I’m running 2 businesses with my cell number as my primary line, I get a lot of voicemail. Going through and listening to what message I want when I want is a blessing. I don’t know if I could ever go back after having Visual Voicemail.

I was very wary of the keyboard at first. I’ve been using a BlackBerry that had one of the best keyboards on any mobile device, so the lack of physical buttons scared me. After using the iPhone for 2-3 days, I began typing faster than I ever did on my BlackBerry. This isn’t a joke… I type faster on my iPhone than any other device I’ve used. The software that backs the keyboard is so “smart” it isn’t funny. The best way to go about typing on the iPhone is to use both thumbs and just hammer away at the keyboard like you would on any device. The software is smart enough to know what you’re trying to type based on where your thumbs hit the screen. I fired through a long paragraph and only had a couple of mistakes (and only because the words I was typing were close to other words and the software didn’t know which I wanted). The software learns as you use the device, so it will adapt to words you use frequently and learn new words that weren’t there before. I’ve successfully tough my iPhone to spell “Giggity.” Good for me.

The Calendar application works very well because of the scrolling actions with your finger. You have 3 options: List view, which shows like an agenda of all your appointments, Day view, which shows like a normal day in any PC or Mac calendar application, and Month view, which shows your full month with the selected day’s events below. I’m personally a big fan of list view. The cool part there is, say you need to check your schedule for a day 3 weeks ahead, but then need to get back to today. There’s no need to scroll back and Apple conveniently put a Today button at the top when in List view. Somebody was thinking there.

There’s not much to say about the iPod features of the iPhone. It’s an iPod. It works just as expected. Cover Flow is an utterly amazing way to browse through your music collection and I expect Apple will add this to all the iPods in the very near future.

You’ve seen the commercials that say the iPhone gives you the real internet on your phone. Well, they’re almost close to correct. Safari on the iPhone is the absolute best mobile browser ever created. You get to see the full website as it should be. Because you’re loading a full site and not a mobile version, it can take longer for a site to load over EDGE, but it’s not terribly long. Loot Ninja loads up fairly quickly in case you were wondering. There’s a couple issues I have with Safari. The first is it’s not the most stable application I’ve ever seen on a mobile device. The program will sometimes crash unexpectedly without any warning. The second issue is there’s no Flash support, so you can’t really view full Flash sites or any videos on the web. I’m sure Apple will be fixing both of these issues soon.

The iPhone does mail pretty well, but it’s not a BlackBerry. The only real push option right now is to use Yahoo mail, and I have no desire to ever do that. You can easily add any other POP3 or IMAP account to the iPhone and can pull email manually or every 15, 30, or 45 minutes. I personally use the POP3 option and have 3 emails accounts pulling mail every 30 minutes. What’s nice is every time you open Mail, it will check for new email for you. So if you have it set for every 30 minutes but need to check something quickly, just open mail and it will download any new messages. There’s no real Exchange support on the iPhone right now, so if you need to integrate this with your work servers, you may not have much luck. I hear this is coming later this year, but it’s not set in stone.

Email you receive is full HTML email. So any fonts, colors, etc. get pushed through to the iPhone with ease. It will also display any pictures you receive in-line in the email. You can download and view Word, Excel and PDF documents with ease. The only problem I’ve found with this is the Mail application will automatically download any attachments you get. In my case, I get a lot of PDF’s that amount up to 15 to 20 MB. Having the iPhone download all of these for one email takes a good bit of time, especially over EDGE. I’m hoping Apple puts in an option to not automatically download attachments in a future software update.

Google Maps is a staple in my daily life, so having it on my phone is a huge plus. I use it almost everyday to pull up directions to all kinds of places. Not having to print out these directions all the time makes things easier for me and saves a few trees in the process. You can bookmark your favorite places (such as Home and other landmarks) for faster access. I usually hit my home bookmark then start from there. One of the best features with the Google Maps integration is getting directions to someone in your contacts list very easily. Open the contact and click on the address… and there you are. Google Maps will drop a pin right there for you to grab direction to or from there. This is where the home bookmark comes in handy as you can tell it to give you directions to or from that pin from any bookmark. When I first found this feature I was like a little kid that found his Dad’s Playboy… yeah, I was that excited. Everything else works just like you’ve seen or read in other reviews.

YouTube on the iPhone is an iffy deal for me. Sure, it provides wonderful videos to watch on the go. But the fact that YouTube needs to convert it’s video collection to Apple’s H.264 codec from their Flash videos makes it tough to keep up with the massive collections on the site. There’s a lot you won’t be able to find from your iPhone, which gets frustrating here and there. When you do find your video, it loads fast and looks great. I just wish Apple would either put in Flash support and enable the full YouTube library or help Google’s staff out in converting the YouTube videos to H.264.

The camera on the iPhone is pretty simple. It’s of the 2 megapixel variety, but without a flash or any controls. When you open the camera application, you get 2 buttons: one to access pictures you’ve taken and the other to take a new picture. It would have been nice for Apple to provide options for black and white, sepia, white balance, brightness, etc. The quality of the pictures is pretty good, but they could be even better with some manual settings available. I’m fairly certain these can be added with a software update in the future.

There’s a Stock widget on the iPhone, which I can’t say I use very often. I’m no day trader, so I don’t really have a huge need to check the market at multiple times during the day. You can add however many stocks you want and check their past performance, which is nice.

The Weather widget is a great little tool to check the forecast. If you’re on a cell phone, chances are you’re not in the house, which means you can easily see the current conditions. Look out the window folks. But if you want to know what’s going in the next 5 days, the iPhone will definitely let you know. You can put in as many cities as you’d like to keep track of the weather whenever you might want to travel. I do have one issue with the Weather widget, which has nothing to do with the iPhone. The weather is updated by Yahoo, who doesn’t really update the current conditions often for some locations. Where I live showed 60 degrees at night for 5 days straight, then 74 degrees and sunny for another 4 days. Not the most accurate there guys. Maybe someone can tell Yahoo to get on the ball with this one.

With all the great things I love about the iPhone, there’s definitely quite a few things missing. Along with the things I’ve mentioned above, there’s a few things I’d like to see fixed and added. There’s no option to use your own ringtones, no MMS support for picture messaging, no voice dial, no Flash plugin support, and no iChat application. I really do expect Apple to add these features via software updates in the near future, probably in October when OSX Leopard gets released. I’m also hoping they fix the call volume issues and add features to make the camera a bit better.

If you’re still reading, you might deserve a medal. Hell, I probably would have stopped my now. Too many words… brain will implode. Anyway, that’s what I think of the iPhone. It’s far and away the best smartphone I’ve used, even in it’s current state. Granted, I’m not connecting in a standard business setting to an Exchange server, so factor that in when you’re making your own decisions. Yes, it’s expensive, but in my opinion, it’s worth it.