I appreciate that there are a lot of reviewers here who have been having many problems with their iPhones. I used to have issues with my 3G (constant low memory issues, needs to reboot, less than stellar battery life), but since I've upgrade to the 3GS with it's considerable extra memory (I'm talking about runtime memory, not the flash memory for apps, tunes, movies, etc.) and apparently better battery, or battery management, I can go for several days in standby mode, talk time is excellent, I rarely need to restart (and when I do it's because of a buggy third party app) and the Exchange integration is great, at least for me.

It's hard to see what these incremental updates do exactly. In my case, they never break anything, and I am just very patient because it can sometimes take a long time to update a 3GS 32GB model (with the backups, flashing the firmware, etc.) They've never hosed my phone, that's for sure.

This update is a two parter. A long download, long flashing the firmware OS update, plus a very quick 'carrier' AT&T update which adds nothing that I can see. The last carrier update added MMS (about 4 years too late IMHO!).

Sorry some folks are having such trouble. If you live near an Apple store, go hassle a Genius about it... they're usually pretty helpful. If not, call Apple directly.