There's been a lot of missed iPhone 3G news while we were gone, so we wanted to make sure we kept everybody up-to-date with this round-up post. We'll include information from a few reviews, information about how much the iPhone 3G costs to make, what it looks like under the shiny black (or white) case, a couple of tips, and info about why it might be a pain in the butt to return a defective phone.

So today we took the plunge along with thousands of other people and bought the iPhone 3G. As we mentioned earlier today, we did this only because we were able to sell our original iPhones that we bought in January for $399, on eBay for $425. We sold them three days before the WWDC Keynote, so we've been without our phones for about a month.

The next 24 hours is going to be pure chaos for Apple fans, and the madness started early this morning when Apple released iTunes 7.7. That was then followed by the App Store launch, then a "leaked" iPhone 2.0 firmware, and more. It's madness I tell you.

It was the 4th of July here in the United States on Friday, and most people found themselves gathering with friends and family to watch fireworks or BBQ. Not watching fireworks was a family of 3 people (later joined by about 7 more people) who decided that they were going to start the iPhone 3G line outside of the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York a whole one week ahead of the launch.

Are you iReady? If you're not, AT&T and Apple are finally releasing all of the information necessary to make sure that you are.

With the announcement of the iPhone 3G has come some confusion over who qualifies for an upgrade. This time around the phones are being subsidized by AT&T which means they have control over who gets upgraded pricing and who doesn't. Some current 2G iPhone owners have been confused thinking that they won't be able to get the phones priced at $199 and $299.