Conference calling on the iPhone

There is an incredible feature of the iPhone I have not heard about in any reviews thus far that I think will ring very popular with lots of people. The best way to describe the feature is to tell you what happened:

- While travelling to Starbucks this afternoon, I called my friend Barry who just bought an iPhone to see how his activation process was going (I called him on his existing Treo)
- While on the phone with Barry, my friend Matt calls in to ask me a question
- On a whim, I merged the two calls, which happened easily by pressing the Merge Calls button... this now changes the "Barry Crawford" banner at the top of my screen to "Barry Crawford and Matt Broms".
- I then decided to go a step further and see how it would work if I added another person, so I decided to call my dad... what happens here is Barry and Matt are put on hold and could continue their conversation while I'm hooking up with my dad... as it turns out, I got dad's voicemail and so I was able to dump his call and return to Barry and Matt.
- Dad calls me back a minute later because he saw he missed my call... again I put Barry and Matt on hold and they can continue talking and I answer my dad's call
- I then hit merge and we have a 4 way call (with the option to add yet another).
- Meanwhile, I arrive at my destination (Starbucks) and turn my car off... the call immediately goes from through my bluetooth handsfree in the car to the phone speaker flawlessly.
- At this point, the banner at the top says "Conference" and there is an arrow to expand and see the participants... so at this point I see Barry, Matt, and Dad. I have the ability to enter a private conversation with any one of them and the others will be put on hold but can talk amongst themselves while I have my private conversation. I can also switch between my private conversation and the other two party conversation if I want to... all within the user interface, but I instead choose to merge the calls together again.
- Barry has to go to take another call. He is talking to us on his Treo and he received another phone call so he had to "flash" over to the other call... as such he essentially put us on hold and was using minutes with us because he had no way to "hang up" with us... but he didn't know this! My phone still showed the three caller participants and I was able to disconnect Barry from the call. Otherwise, when he finished his other call, his phone would have rung and it would have still been us!
- As Matt and dad hung up, they just went away from my conference call list.

The functionality of this is beyond ANY phone on the market today to my knowledge and is extremely useful. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to bring someone on to a three-way call only to get their voicemail, disconnect, and then have them call back 2 minutes later only to tell them to hang up so I can bring them into the three way call. This functionality will be worth the price of admission for some people. It's just another way that the iPhone takes the interaction with the telephone to a whole new level... EVERYthing has a user interface... no "flashing" between calls... no dialing voicemail. Even setting up my voicemail greeting is done through a user interface with a simple "record" button.

Can't wait to see what comes next!