I've had the phone for four weeks now and here are my comments:1) This phone has the longest learning curve of any I have owned, including my last phone with was a Sierra Wireless smartphone. Nonetheless, as I learn the features I become more and more happy with it.2) We get much better reception in our neighborhood with Verizon than with Cingular but of course your mileage may vary. Unfortunately, we switched carriers and phones at the same time so I cannot exactly distinguish between the role of the phone and the carrier. I have used my wife's brand new Verizon RAZR and this phone from our home in a very hilly, woodsy neighborhood and this appears to be the better of the two. But, it seems like flip phones always have an inferior reception.3) If you're going to listen to MP3s on this you must get the Music Essentials Kit for $30. It includes the CD which converts Windows Media Player 10 to 'sync'. This is a good feature because most people have a comfort level with WMP. The sync process works well. You need the user guide the first time and then after that it's a piece of cake. The MEK also includes a special USB cable that has a jack in it so that you can recharge your phone's battery at the same time as you are downloading tunes onto your SD card. This is a very novel and useful feature. Downloading tunes does take a little bit of time (maybe 10 - 20 minutes for a 512MB card) because it looks like it converts the tunes from MP3s to 128kbps WMAs. The MEK also includes stereo earbuds. These are a mixed blessing. The buds are pretty big and difficult to keep in your ears without falling out. On the other hand, the earbuds have a mic on the cord and you can press a button to answer a call and use the mic and earbuds for a call. It's pretty nice and a lot cheaper than the $100 bluetooth stereo headsets.4) For people who don't buy the MEK, there's an adapter in the box that let's you use a pair of headphones provided they have a 2.5mm jack.5) As for the 'softkey' it is easy to 'fat finger' the wrong button. Key pressure is adjustable and I have toggled it between medium and soft. I seem to prefer soft better.6) Battery life seems to be great if you use just the phone. I went eight days after the first charge. Using it as a MP3 player sucks the batteries much quicker. I typically use it playing tunes for maybe an hour a day and I charge it every other night. It does seem to recharge quickly though and the ability to charge it while syncing tunes onto the memory card is a nice feature.The bottom line is that it's a very nice phone/MP3 player.