The iPhone is one of the most anticipated technological gizmos ever. I waited five hours in line on June 29 to snatch one of these cool toys and ever since I bought it, everyone keeps asking me "does it live up to the hype?"
And while the phone does a lot of things incredibly well, it also has its shortcomings.
At first glance the iPhone is even cooler than you would imagine. The touch-screen display is absolutely breathtaking.
The picture quality of the screen is better than anything I have seen. Everything looks so clear and crisp and the navigation system on the phone is easy to learn and completely intuitive.
The touch-screen technology also works surprisingly well. The screen's touch interface is very responsive and easy to get used to.
The only qualm I have with the screen is that the keyboard can only be accessed vertically and not horizontally which makes typing difficult if you have large fingers.
The iPod features on the phone work flawlessly. Music videos, television shows and movies look gorgeous on the generous 3.5-inch screen.
The iPhone comes with basic headphones that unfortunately do not get as loud as I would like. But the scrolling album art interface is very beautiful to gawk at.
The text messaging feature is very Apple-centric, using a conversation style chat blurbs to show the message in the conversation. The iPhone has come under fire for not having IM capabilities, but the text messaging on the phone basically works as well as IM, thus eliminating the need for an instant messaging service.
The Google maps feature works very well on the EDGE network or using a Wi-Fi connection.
It allows fast searching of anything. I've used Google maps to successfully find a number of Starbucks in the local area. The only downside with Google maps is that there is no GPS on the phone, which means the phone cannot pinpoint where you are and give you directions from that point. You have to type in your location to get directions.
My biggest complaint about the iPhone is the lack of 3G-network support. Apple is using its slower EDGE network for web surfing and other Internet features.
The iPhone's Wi-Fi capability minimizes the devastation of having such slow network speeds. If you can find a local Wi-Fi connection that the Internet works brilliantly, but if you have to use the EDGE network then you will have to wait a long time for Web sites to show up.
The iPhone displays Web sites in full HTML text which, to be quite honest, look incredible.
And the touch screen capability allows you to zoom in and out effortlessly to get to a point where you can read anything on a Web site without squinting.
As soon as the iPhone is on a network with decent data speeds then the iPhone's Internet capability will be a force to reckon with.
Overall, the iPhone is a gorgeous product with a few flaws that tech nerds and Apple haters can point to as to why the phone isn't the revolutionary product Steve Jobs promised us.
But what the iPhone does it does very well and of course you can't discount the coolness factor with the phone.
A number of people have come to me just to take a look at it. No other phone on the market garners such attention and I imagine no other phone likely will.
In the end, the iPhone is a fun little toy and I don't regret standing five hours in line to get it.
