Why not be upfront, take orders rather than meaningless deposits and advise peolpe when they can get one. If its the end of July who cares as certainly all who want one will not be getting it on July 11th.

My advice to those in ‘the sticks’ would be to check online coverage maps for the other providers first, and if one shows even possible coverage, ask them what kind of recourse you have if they connect it and they can’t provide adequate service in your area. At least some carriers (I only know Optus for sure) provide a facility to exit the contract in the first month without cancellation costs (and without paying for anything other than calls/data used in the time you had the service). If and only if you can’t get adequate service through another provider would I ever recommend using Telstra.

If you absolutely have no alternative coverage, shop around for a cheaper deal on a Next G phone to buy outright (but make sure you get a warranty of course). That way you might be able to use some sort of prepaid service, or worst case scenario a month-to-month plan, that you can cancel away from as soon as other providers expand their coverage to your area.

Good luck if you’re in this situation!

- Matthew

The BlackBerry theory sounds plausible as part of the problem, though reports suggest that the arguments over how many Telstra-specific bookmarks and links to Sensis content can be included are also a big problem. As is the fact that Telstra runs BigPond Music, which competes with the iTunes Store.

In any case, for serious business use, the BlackBerry is a better choice than the iPhone, I’d argue — built-in keyboard, longer-established software base. It’s good that the next iPhone will have Exchange support, but history suggests we’ll need a few patches before it works well.

He said that the he latest word is all carriers will have access, but the new 3G version will run best on NextG, something about the carrier frequency!(could be hype)

It seems the reason we haven’t heard a lot about Telstra and the new iphone in the same sentence is because the big wigs at Telstra don’t want to upset Blackberry. Blackberry are releasing the “Bold” in august (the next G blackberry).

From what I understand Telstra have a very large business customer base on blackberry.

But as I’m not a journalist, of course this is all un-confirmed, and you didn’t hear it from me.