Multiple antenna systems are known to provide very large data rates, when the perfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the receiver. However, this requires the receiver to perform a noise-free, multi-dimensional channel estimation, without using communication resources. In practice, any channel estimation is noisy and uses system resources. We shall examine the trade-off between improving channel estimation and increasing the achievable data rate. We consider transmitside correlated multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels with block fading, where each block is divided into training and data transmission phases. The receiver has a noisy CSI that it obtains through a channel estimation process, while the transmitter has partial CSI in the form of covariance feedback. In Part I of this two-part paper, we consider the single-user case, and optimize the achievable rate jointly over parameters associated with the training phase and data transmission phase. In particular, we f...