There are a lot of iPhone rants, reviews, and revelations out there already, so I’m not going to go into a long diatribe about every little thing the iPhone does. Here’s my early experience and perspective thus far:

• Setup via. iTunes was a snap; I had no authorization lag whatsoever (within 2 minutes and the phone had authorized).
• Straight-up as a telephone and nothing else, I’d give it a B-. The form factor isn’t great for a phone. I find myself using my phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder a lot, and this phone doesn’t ‘feel’ natural when held in that way. To be fair, plenty of the phones I have owned have failed that test for me, including my RAZR. And, it isn’t built with the telephone as the front-and-center attraction. So, I concur with other reviews that ‘getting to the phone’ doesn’t seem as immediate as with the other cellphones on the market, where pressing a ‘down’ button pushes you right into the phone book. On the iPhone you do need to click one or two times more to get there. I’ll trade those two clicks for everything else the phone does. With my early usage, call quality hasn’t been an issue at all.
• Using the phone with the included ear bud/microphone was fine, although I’d really like it if you could get rid of one of the ear buds temporarily (by ‘unplugging’ one of the buds and its wire at the ‘Y’ connector). Speaker phone is great. I haven’t tried a Bluetooth headset (not a fan of these, but I might give it a try though just for the car).
• Simply stated, the Edge network sucks for connectivity when using Safari, Google Maps, YouTube… basically anything that is going top pull a reasonable amount of data from the web feels painfully 56k. Internet browsing suffers the worst. Disappointing. The device is so slick in how it functions, you just expect the it to download like a banshee.
• Connectivity when using wireless networks is decent in what I’ve seen so far. The WiFi at my home, which is B/G/Pre-N was easy to connect to. Speed-wise, it did make me look up the tech specs to see if the phone supported only B. The specs say it is B/G. Maybe the whiz-bang effect of how great the rest of the UX is amplifies connectivity’s shortcomings.
• All the iPod features are great; Cover Flow is meant for this form factor.
• Maybe there are great things in the works for the YouTube equation later, but in its current state, it’s not of interest to me.
• I found the touch screen to be fine for typing, but I can see how someone who text messages a lot would be able to move faster with a tactile keyboard. It is surprisingly accurate and highly responsive.
• The overall user experience is better than I’ve personally experienced on another phone, PDA or media player. Very fluid and intuitive to use. I like how there isn’t a ‘quit’ button for applications, but, instead, when you move away from, then back to, an application you pick up where you left off.

There will undoubtedly be people who hate this phone. There are plenty of people that won’t like anything that Apple (or Microsoft, for that matter) puts on a shelf simply because of the shipping address it comes from. Regardless, there is something that everyone should like about the iPhone—it will likely serve as a change agent. The user experience offered by cellphones, PDAs and SmartPhones has floundered around at a mediocre level for years. The iPhone puts a unique, well thought out, user-centered solution on the table for the mobile industry to contemplate.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention—I like it.

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