I was a big fan of my iPhone 2G when I first bought it. At least part of that love came from having a stable mobile device, something the Treo 650 never could accomplish. With WiFi and EDGE, the original iPhone was faster than the Treo and as an Apple device, it would sync cleanly with my Mac desktop. Sadly, my love for it has diminished over the last two and half years, thanks in part to AT&T's dissing of it during their MMS rollout, AT&T's lackluster service, and the inevitable slowness a hardware device gets as its OS receives update after update.
The OS revisions have seriously impacted the performance of the device. I have, on multiple occasions, slid the slider to answer a call, and watched helplessly as the phone rang and rang and rang and sent the call to voicemail. The original iPhone has become sluggish when it first starts up as it works in the background to update all my mail accounts and my calendars. Apple's own apps alone running in the background are performance killing. I can hardly think what would happen if I had third-party apps running in the background, too.
AT&T, on the other hand, has no excuse. The lack of MMS on the original iPhone, a feature that requires a trivial hack to enable and when they had customers still bound to their two-year contract, plus the increase of $15 for a 3G contract was enough that I never bought an iPhone 3G. Simply put, I don't want AT&T to be my carrier and I don't want to restart the clock with AT&T's two-year service agreements.
Steve Jobs is probably not happy with AT&T this afternoon, either. After failing to get the iPhone 4 on the WiFi network during the keynote, Steve tried AT&T and got a bunch of nothing. Honestly, at that point I thought he was going to pull out an iPhone connected to another carrier especially since (here is where my muted optimism comes in) one slide in the keynote today mentioned "Quad-band HSDPA / HSUPA".
Quad-band?
The iPhone 3G and iPad are both tri-band HSDPA / HSUPA. Those three bands would be AT&T's 850 & 1900 bands, plus the rest-of-the-world standard 2100 band. Missing is T-Mobile's 1700 (AWS) band. Does the "quad-band" bullet mean the iPhone 4 can run on T-Mobile's 3G networks? I sure hope so. T-Mobile is cheaper than AT&T when you go no-contract with them. (Yes, that's right. No-contract is cheaper.)
Having an option for another carrier in the US would eliminate two of my three issues with the iPhone: namely AT&T and AT&T. The A4 processor, a screamer in my iPad compared to my iPhone, takes care of the third.