My GMAT Experience - 730

Was a little held up with gmat preps and then with the apps, so couldn't post on the forum.
Sharing my gmat experience

Gave my GMAT on 16th July '09 and scored 730.

Background info abt me: I am an IT engineer from India. I started preparing for the exam around February, but was unable to seriously prepare and gain any pace for 2-3 months mainly because of work pressure and lack of seroiusness. To add to the work pressure IPL and T20 world cup were the major distractions.

Materials used during the prep:
OG 11
OG 12
OG Verbal Review
Cracking the GMAT- Princeton (didn't find it much useful)
Princeton Verbal Workbook
Manhattan GMAT SC
Kaplan 800

Apart from these materials, I used to browse through beatthegmat and manhattangmat. manahattangmat's forum has detailed explanation for lot of problems by Stacey and Ron.

Tests I gave
GMAT prep1(right at the start without any prep) - 690
3 Manhattan tests: ranged between 630-680 don't remember the exact scores
Powerprep1 - 710
Powerprep2 - 700
GMAT prep2 - 730
GMAT prep1 (retake) - 660 (screwed up verbal big time..got a couple of phone calls in the middle of the test)
On an average, I ranged 48-51 on quants in the practice tests and 28-40 on the verbal

Exam experience:
Quant was pretty straight forward. Didn't face any difficulty at all and ended up the section 15 mins before time. I found the difficulty level to be a little more than the GMAT prep tests, but definitely less than the Manhattan ones. I used to end up Quant around 20-30 mins before time in GMAT prep and power prep tests.

I was really surprised at the verbal score as, I was not expecting a good score there. After a few decent SC and CR questions, I got two tough RCs and couldn't even make a work out out of the 2nd one. That scared the hell out of me. And then the level of questions went down and I didn't face much trouble. CRs were all straight forward, and SCs were of medium difficulty level.