Come to Mama!

The long wait is finally over... and as promised, the iPhone has so far, exceeded my expectations. I am a technophobe and this phone took me about 10 minutes to set up and get it running. The Apple website provided a lot of video tutorials even before the release of the phone so it wasn't as traumatic as I thought it would be. And for the first time ever, I didn't have to know POP3, SMTP, IMAP and all that tech crap to set up my email. Yey!!!

There are three things that are readily noticeable with the iPhone:

1. There is no place for a SIM card.
2. The battery is basically inaccessible without the right tool.
3. The screen is huge!

Once you buy it, you can only activate it with ATT. As the sole service provider, ATT must have made at least a cool $40 mil for the bundled iPhone services alone (at $20 minimum times 2 million units). Then there's a $36 activation for non-ATT subscribers. Plus the voice plan. It's a pretty staggering amount when all is said and done! Then you must use iTunes to set up your account with Apple for software upgrades and registration for warranty purposes.

Apple has set the price at $499 for the 4GB, $599 for the 8GB. It has a black screen and aluminum body, slightly thinner than the 30GB iPod. When it's off, it's like nothing. When it's on is when the fun begins. The display is stunning. The device is intuitive and uses touch technology. Everything is done with a tap of a finger or by flicking a finger while lightly touching the screen to scroll up or down. Downloads are fast... the entire front page of the New York Times in less than a minute. Even Google map is fun to use. If you're used to Mac's OS-X, then the iPhone is not a big deal. Even syncing and downloading songs from your music library is painless. If you have an iPod and you use iTunes, then this is a piece of cake. The one thing that you do have to watch out for is downloading movies and tv shows. Those occupy a lot of valuable space and without an expandable memory capability, you have to be choosy on what to download.

My only complaint (if you can call it that) is I have to re-learn how to input SMS as the keyboard is the traditional "QWERTY" style. Also, depending on how fat the finger you're using, you could be tapping on the wrong letter. It will take me time but hey, that's okay, too. It has a 2MP camera which takes decent pictures. There are no adjustments (i.e. shooting in black and white or night mode) and no video shooting capabilities. I guess that would be iPhone2... The phone itself has a beautiful reception and sound quality is really good. The iPod function is way cool specially with cover flow. And where else can you get a phone where YouTube has its own icon?

That skateboarding dog makes me smile every time...

So is it worth it? Definitely. The coolness factor alone is priceless. Well, $600 to be exact. This is a classic example of a successful convergence of three multimedia devices. Once again, this raises the bar for everybody else out there. It will be interesting what the competition will come out with although LG tried with its Prada phone.