It's been a little over one week with iPhone as my fulltime phone. First of all, when people ask, "What's so revolutionary about the iPhone?" or "What's the difference between iPhone and my _________ phone?" my answer has been, "Technically? Nothing. In fact it's missing many features of your phone. But the iPhone is all about the experience. It's like driving a Mercedes versus driving a Hyundai. They both essentially do the same thing, but packaged and presented completely different."

That difference is what makes the iPhone the most satisfying phone I've ever owned. And granted, I'm not a cell phone phreak. In fact I hate phones. I hate talking on the phone. I hate messaging on a phone. I hate carrying a phone. I've had opportunities to own a "smartphone," but have turned them down every time. Mostly because it's an additional tether to a part of my life that I'd rather not be tethered to... AKA work. But also because the last thing I need in my life is another device that is a pain in the ass to use.

I'll start my biased review with the negatives...

Contacts should be a top-level application. I appreciate the design philosophy Apple took here. Let's get rid of top level buttons—which increases perceived complexity—by burying the contacts where they will be used the most... in the phone application. That may be true if you use the phone functionalities 90% of the time. It becomes burdensome when you use the phone only a small fraction of the time. Also lacking in the contacts is the ability to add contacts to groups or create groups on the phone. A minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless.

Like many other reviewers have said, the Mail application is not all it should be. The concept of "syncing" mail is completely absent. Sure, it syncs the actual accounts so you don't have to configure the accounts yourself, but syncing mail means ensuring the mail folders (inbox, sent, trash, drafts, etc.) are mirrored on your desktop and the phone. If you have IMAP accounts (thank you AOL and Yahoo), this is done for you by the nature of the IMAP protocol. But if you still manage a ton of POP accounts (GMail included), this becomes a painful experience. While I've not found the need to create mail folders on the phone, I could see this becoming an issue as well. Another overlooked but extremely powerful feature of mail is the ability to change the sender account, regardless of which mailbox account you're composing within, when composing mail like you can with most mail clients in existance.

Being able to use landscape mode for all applications would be nice and quite honestly, I don't know why we can't. I don't see a technical barrier in the way. The keyboard is quite good. In portrait mode I can swiftly type using one finger. In landscape mode I can use two thumbs and double my input rate.

The recent call list doesn't indicate if a call was outgoing or incoming. Missed calls are in a red font, which is fine, but if you're recent list has the same names on it you can't tell if you made the call or accepted the call. The "Clear" button also is a bit misleading. If you're looking at only the "Missed" calls and you tap the "Clear" button, it clears the entire Recents list. This is a misleading user interface gesture.

The camera is probably the only application on the phone that needs a tactile button. Taking one-handed pictures while ice skating (I took my daughter ice skating on Sunday) is nearly impossible, partly because I suck at ice skating and taking a picture with two hands means I can't hold onto the side rail at the same time. Lack of zoom and other camera-like functions also cramped my style.

One of the only real bugs I've found is when using Safari and listening to music. Once in a while the music will stop, which I assume is caused by the browser. It makes me wonder about how this thing is threaded and how it shares memory. Curiously, it seems to happen when using heavily AJAXed sites. Another annoying inconvenience is not being able to edit the URL when saving a bookmark. Many websites will redirect from whatever.com to a very specific URL which could change in the future rendering the bookmark useless. To change the bookmark's URL, you have to go in after the fact and edit it.

Generally speaking, input could be improved by simply adding copy and paste. Numerous times I've found myself needing to copy a block of text from emails to SMS to webpages. Also selecting a block of text just to delete it would be nice. Although I feel it should've been included in this first release, I can understand why it might have been left out. I've read that Apple engineers could not find a method to implement this functionality without creating usability issues. I admire that, and honestly, it doesn't really prevent you from using the phone as a communications device. It's just one of those incredibly annoying things about the phone that could've been addressed in a positive way in the two plus years of development.

For the most part, the iPod functionality is great. My only pet peeve is that the node on the progress bar that indicates the current point on the track or video is so dang small it's impossible to accurately position it with your finger.

Now the good stuff...

The device, physically, is beautifully designed. It feels solid in your hand. The screen is gorgeous and easy to see in every environment I've put it in (little light, direct sunlight, etc.). While it does accumulate oils from fingers as expected, the screen is bright enough to power right through the gook and remain crisp.

Overall, the experience of using the device is as advertised. The applications flow seemlessly and respond quickly to your actions. Unlike my RAZR, bringing up the contact list doesn't take two seconds. The experience of listening to music while browsing the internet, texting via SMS and receiving phone calls is brilliantly orchestrated. This is what I call the "experience." This is the difference between driving a Mercedes and a Hyundai. This device seems to understand how you would use a phone and executes to your expectation.

I handed the device to my six year old daughter and within minutes, with very little verbal instruction, she was able to use the phone and its features like a pro. She was browsing photos using the finger gestures to zoom and page, browsing the web, SMSing her mom, calling her mom, editing her contact sheet, applying images to contacts, finding the nearest bowling alleys on Google Maps, taking photos and emailing them to herself and watching videos on YouTube (with my supervision of course). That is a true test of a device and its usability.

While the headphones that come with the phone are uncomfortable in my ears, the integrated microphone/remote control is brilliant. I find myself putting up with the ear buds to take advantage of the remote functions. Simple and elegant. It does just enough to warrant its existance.

Overall, for someone who hates phones, this phone has been a pure joy to use. What makes me even more excited is that this is the starting point. It will get better and that should make other cell phone manufacturers fearful. The many small annoyances can easily be addressed via software updates. But as far as a version 1.0 product, it's solid.