Results? In different tests with signal strength, ranging from two to four bars on the phone, and at different times of day and week, we were getting connection speeds from just under 500 Kbps to just under 900 Kbps.

That's similar to, or slightly better than, other 3G mobile devices we've tested, and better than some entry-level DSL services.

Nothing apparently has changed significantly from the first-gen iPhone Web surfing experience - other than the speed, that is. The Safari browser worked well in my testing. Double tapping the screen enlarges the image. In most cases, this makes pages with otherwise unreadably small text readable.

This is one area where the iPhone (and iPod Touch) touchscreen interface really pays dividends. Scrolling down a long Web page - or across it if you've enlarged it - is a simple matter of flicking with your finger up, down or across the screen.

And if you tap the overlapping page icon at the bottom of the Safari screen, which also shows the number of Safari tabs you have open, you get a thumbnail filmstrip of open pages which you can scroll across using the same flicking

motion.

Improved sound quality?

We didn't have a first-generation iPhone to compare, but this one sounds remarkably good, significantly better than the music-playing BlackBerry and Motorola smartphones we've tested recently - clearer, fuller-bodied, more realistic. It's similar in quality to an iPod Nano.

The included earbuds appear to be standard iPod issue - i.e. not bad sounding, not great. (We tested sound quality with audiophile headphones.) If you want to jog while listening to tunes on your iPhone, you'll probably have to buy different earbuds - these ones will fall out unless you have very tiny lug holes.

For iPhone users who don't work for a company with a Microsoft Exchange e-mail system, nothing, apparently, has changed in the e-mail experience.

If your company uses Microsoft Exchange, it looks to be fairly simple to set up an Exchange account and receive true push e-mail, which you couldn't do with the first-generation product. We weren't able to test the Exchange functionality, however.

In the iPhone's Settings menu, you'll find an option for Fetch New Data, in which you can toggle Push on or off. This allows the phone to support Exchange and other push e-mail services.

If Push is set to Off in the Fetch New Data tab, or if the software doesn't support push, the phone uses the schedule you select - every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, hourly - or only retrieves data when you tap the connect button.

Only Active Sync mail applications, Apple's Mobile Me and Yahoo mail work in push mode, according to Apple. But my Rogers POP mail account, which is Yahoo, did not work in push mode..

Also, at least with Rogers service, the phone appears to only download headers, at least sometimes. On a few occasions, when we opened a message, the software went back out to the server to get the body, but was unable to get it for some reason. This, we assume, is a Rogers problem and nothing to do with the iPhone mail software.

The good? Messages look great and are easy to read. Return addresses appear as easy-to-tap buttons in open messages.

Setting up the iPhone to receive messages from our POP account was easy. The phone automatically downloaded account information based on e-mail address and password - but then our ISP is, um, Rogers, so that was perhaps no great achievement.