I'm 10 miles outside of Birmingham, AL and I've had my phone for 3 days. It's likely going back to the store (for a second and final time). I've read that the antenna on Samsung phones is typically weaker than for other manufacturers' phones and I now believe it. I think that this phone's performance is 100% tied to how good your area's signal is because if it's not strong, you're out of luck.
The mail app on the phone is pretty awful anyway but if the phone can't get a reliable data connection, it seems to stop even trying to get mail on the 5 minute schedule I've set up. If I go in and ask the mail to update, it might, or it might not. Most of the time it says that there was a connection error. The Mail Droid app is a little better for whatever reason but still hangs as soon as signal strength wanes (again, that darn antenna).
Browsing is either great or non-existent. Most of the time, it sits there thinking - definitely not what I saw in the store. It was lightning fast and I was impressed. Call quality is ok - but I've had two calls drop/couldn't answer them because of a signal issue.
My indicator almost always shows zero or one teeny bar and it vascillates between 3G and 1x. This happened a little bit on my Blackberry Curve, but it never stopped me from browsing (which is notoriusly slow on the Curve anyway) or getting mail in a reasonably timely fashion. Verizon's reply is that "the Fascinate is not an email phone - go for a BlackBerry if that's important to you". The thing is, that even with the buy one get one free deal they were running, it's a very expensive phone to have such a weak antenna and therefore limited functionality.
