Reception gets a lot better outside the metropolitan area. I had always believed it was because they "tune"the metro antennae to have less vertical spread.
I run a fleet of Next G phones and we have trialed many. The current Telstra crop are not so good and the Telstra brand ZTE ones are shocking. We have gone back to buying old LG TU550 phones from ebay. The iphone actually benchmarks very well against "blue tick"phones. I suspect that the reason it doesn't have it may be apple vs Telstra politics