On Friday last week, I took the plunge and purchased a new and very shiny iPhone.

I did laugh to myself as I entered the O2 store in Milton Keynes. There were crowd control tapes outside the door for the launch of the iPhone and lots of members of staff. At least 10 iPhones were arranged on a table for demo, the only thing that was missing were the hundreds of punters all waiting to sign up for an iPhone. “Would you like to try the iPhone sir” an almost pleading member of staff asked. “Sure” I said, I couldn’t help myself from saying “so, do you have any of these in stock?”

Anyway, I paid my £269 and took my new iPhone home. It did feel a bit strange not having the store setup the phone, but all of the activation is done through iTunes.
Opening the box, I was greeted with my first look at my new phone, the packaging is excellent and the box includes a docking station, usb to docking station lead, charger unit, cleaning cloth, headphones, documentation and of course the iPhone.

I eagerly switched on my PC and fired up iTunes. Then I connected the iPhone only to be greeted with the message “iTunes does not support iPhone with this version of iTunes, please install the 64bit version of iTunes” Huh? I knew that I had the latest version of iTunes, so I did a bit of digging on Google and discovered that iTunes does not work properly with vista 64bit. Luckily for me, I fired up my Hackingtosh and ran through the activation on that. I must say in iTunes defence that the activation was smooth and the phone was working in less than 10 minutes.

Wow, how cool is the iPhone, all of my anger at iTunes melted away as soon as the iPhone lit up for the first time. The screen is just a joy to look at and use, I keep finding myself playing with the phone just because.

Amazing applications, this is the best phone I have ever used. I was worried that the onscreen keyboard was going to be a real pain to use, nope; it’s the best phone keyboard I have ever used. In less than 5 minutes I was typing like a pro, the predictive text is excellent and very easy to use, you just press the onscreen spacebar to insert the word or not, the choice is yours. The text messaging is just a joy, I love the way that the texts are displayed like a conversation. The camera is not to bad either, a lot of reviews have slated it, but I thought it’s ok and I love snapping a picture and then zooming into it using my fingers. Email supports multiple pop3 accounts and push mail from Yahoo, although I haven’t tried this as I don’t have a Yahoo account.
Safari web browsing is just in a league of its own, although it is not without its faults. There is no support for flash or real player, but it’s just so cool to have tabbed browsing on a phone. It even works well using edge although it really zooms along when connected to a wireless network.
The phone is very easy to use and moving over to O2 gives me a better signal strength at home. Contacts are easy to add and you can do all of the usual stuff like assigning ringtones to single users, etc. The phone does have vibrate as well as ring and there is a mute all hard switch on the side of the phone if you do not want any sounds.
The ipod part is cool, although not a massive requirement for me. Flicking through the albums in landscape is very cool though!
Setting up the settings is just so easy; it is really nice with the large screen. Connecting to wireless networks couldn’t be easier, the phone prompts you that there is a wireless network available and you can either join it or cancel the request.

So, in summary, I am very pleased with the iPhone all of the applications are better than I expected and the problems it does have are software rather than hardware based, this means that it should only get better in time.