Some specifics about my experience, and usage tips; I'll leave it to others to do an overview:Out of the box, this is NOT a great phone. It took a LOT of effort to learn and customize in order to use it effectively, but after that, it's very good. If and only if you're up for the effort, I highly recommend the phone. Older phones I've had were much more usable out of the box.MENUS:I changed the home screen buttons around to have the items I use the most - SMS, recent calls, and calendar, and to put phone book where I'm used to it being. I also changed menu order. Some moron put Tools under the Settings menu; that can't be fixed. Since when is a Tool a kind of Setting? Maybe it makes more sense in whatever language the developers speak.PHONE BOOK.I changed the phone book listing format - this was CRUCIAL to making it usable. It has its own Setup menu, separate from Settings. These made it usable, especially View and View by:-- View by:list, Sort by:name, View:Primary Contacts, Search Method: Jump To. I synchronize my phone book with my Mac iBook using the FREE iSync, for easy data entry and for backup.STORAGE:ESSENTIAL: I changed where it stores images, games, and ringtones (from the phone to the memory card), which allowed me to transfer images to my computer, transfer games to & from my computer (e.g. cellufun's free sudoku, chess, etc.), and use an mp3 as a ringtone. This should be possible from the phone's internal memory, but it isn't, so WOW - knowing that this change makes is possible makes the phone MUCH BETTER than I thought it was at first. Also, these settings (and some others too) get lost if the phone loses power and have to be reset; this is LAME!BLUETOOTH:It works well with the cardo scala-500 I got from amazon. I set up a shortcut for quickly enabling bluetooth when I am wearing my headset. FYI, if you get a bluetooth headset, be warned that it can't be used to listen to music; in fact, if you have a bluetooth headset active, it refuses to play music through the built-in speaker. [Edit: it does work with some (unspecified) bluetooth headsets, according to the manual; Update: BUT, I've tried 3 bluetooth headset models and they didn't work. The SLVR doesn't support the required protocol, A2DP, so I think the statement in the manual is false.]iTunes:Very good! I just wish it would remember what songs it had already played. [Edit: maybe the repeat all option does that; it's undocumented; trying it now...]PRICE:I got mine for $50 with contract renewal from cingular ~Mar '06; a billing dispute took such a huge effort to resolve that the office of the president staff let me get it at that price.I've yet to figure out how to use the free EDGE I have grandfathered on my account to browse the Internet at no charge. I've called, but haven't reached a clueful cingular support rep yet.