Well, I've had it now for three weeks and honestly couldn't live without it. I know that sounds a little kooky but hay. I'm coming from 11 years of Sprint who is definitely not known for any kind of customer service and a very old Palm OS Samsung i550. I didn't want the i550, it's that Sprint in all its great wisdom decided the scrap the i330 about four years ago and I had an accident with my beloved i330 (it was flung off the roof of the camaro on GA 400 and met it's demise one night.) So Sprint replaced it with the i550. It was a clunky clamshell Palm.

So when I called Sprint to give them notice, the service rep said "But you know if you download music to that phone, you don't actually own the music, with our phones you own the music and can put it on your computer or your phone." "Oh that's what this does..." I replied. "I download the music from iTunes and put in on my computer and sync the phone. In this way, Apple has made it very easy to listen to the music both on my computer and on the phone, and I can also put the music on several other computers or ipods." "well, that must be something that was hacked together" she said.

Typical Sprint. Dumber than the ring neck doves I used to have.

The rest of the conversation was like this. They were telling me that my plan was a *really good* plan and didn't exist any more and if I come back, i wont get as good of a plan. I said no way, of course. Then they started making deals. I could keep my plan and they'd bump it down to 150 minutes for $15 a month. heh. Um yeah, Nope.

At this moment I was laughing because it was very apparent to me that the iPhone was making them quake in their boots pretty good and they had obviously lost a good number of customers over it. Yes, their hardware does suck, it is inferior, look at their site.

So back to the iPhone. Integration is superb. Everything is very easy to figure out, I had the phone set up completely in a few hours (I had to clean up my address book, sync my palm phone and weed out people who were "junk" and clean up my playlists before I sync'd everything.) But yes, within 2 minutes of starting the sync, movies, music, pod casts (downloaded a MIT class on orbital systems engineering) calendars, emails, photos, etc were pipped into the phone. iTunes acts as a "stepping stool" between information on your computer and the phone.

The typing is something to get used to, but very doable, just cut your fingernails. It will not work if you have salon talons.

The trick with mail is to set up your email accounts to behave like IMAP. Also if you have a .Mac account, enable webmail junk box so that all your Spam is kept to a minimum. Setting up the stocks and weather was very easy but I was disappointed that Apple had not included a radar image on that. If I'm getting ready to go somewhere and want to check the weather, the radar is an important source of information for me. Maybe later.

Texting is great fun and requires no setup. It relies on SMS2 for transport. Visual Voicemail was a bit of a disappointment. Firstly, for some reason I was put on a (non-iPhone) plan which does not allow for that, only regular voicemail. So I had to call AT&T and get them to fix it. So I got it set up, had a few people to call and leave VM's. It just shows the person and time called. You still have to click on it and listen. It's just a prettier interface, I guess.

The camera is good if you don't need a flash. If you're outside, the pictures will come out great. But this is typical of all "camera" phones. If you want a great picture, buy an Olympus. However it is really easy to email photos to people or set them as your Wallpaper.

I was highly delighted to find the Alarms section in Clock module. I typically go in to work at varying times and have about 6 alarms set on my Palm phone with wakes me up at the appropriate time each day. So I was thrilled to find that Apple had coded an area to accommodate all six of my alarms. I suppose too, that I can wake up using the calendar alerts, but I haven't tried that yet.

Safari is Safari. I guess I was already prepped for that from the keynote. It's amazing to use on the iPhone.

My absolute favorite module is the Maps. You click on Maps, scroll to your area, put in say "Fry's" or "Borders" and it brings up all the Borders in your area. You select one and it gives you the phone/website/address/etc. You can then click on directions, you put in your address, and it'll give you directions. You can save that place as a bookmark. Your contacts are linked also so you can click on a contact (if they have an address) it'll zoom to their location.

The battery is excellent. I can *not* charge mine for three days, and it's still good. (Not that I do that, because I rely on it) but it's there if I need it (or forget my power adapter.)

I've never used an iPod before because I don't have time to "listen" to it with headphones. Nope, not for me.

I ran up to Frys and bought an adapter for the Camaro for $100, disengaged the 6 CD changer in the back and ran the cable up to the console. waa-laa - instant iPhone integration. I can control it from the steering wheel or the radio and it plays through my Monsoon sound system. I also bought a Jabra BT125 but was highly disappointed with it's performance in the car. (The faster I went in the Camaro, the more noise I and others heard.) So I got hold of a Jawbone. It has noise reduction. Works much better.

Now, if we can just get AT&T to relax their death grip on several things, like applications running natively and it's ability to show up like a hard drive - like iPods do, so you can run disk utility, store documents on it (Excel, Word files) it'd be even better. As a Systems Administrator I can guess that this is to keep the stolen phones cracked to a minimum. They have installed a lot of safety features that makes me more comfortable that if mine is stolen, once I call it in and they deactivate it, it's going to be completely unusable. It'll be a pretty black brick.

Also beware, I got my first bill and they printed *every* data transfer which was every 3 minutes (I guess the phone does an ET-phone-home for whatever reason every so often) so I got a book for my first bill. heh.

Despite the demands from AT&T and the lack of applications/storage, overall, I'm thrilled and my expectations have been exceeded with this eight year wait. I can't put it more simply than that. It's worth every penny and is going to be a big hit this holiday season. Like I said, it'd be nice to open it up a bit more. But, then again, maybe Apple is saving some things for later.

BTW - got an interesting video here from several years ago...