It has been almost a week since I picked up my iPhone, and I wanted to give my personal perspective on the experience so far. Before getting into the review though, I think it is important to know why I bought an iPhone. Previously I carried a person cell phone, a Treo 700wx for work, and occasionally an iPod. Except in winter, I usually had one in my pocket and just carried the rest in my hand or my laptop bag. The two things that I was looking for out of the iPhone were to combine these devices into one and to do it at a reasonable price. The ability to have ActiveSync for work e-mail push to my phone and a purchase price of $199 for 8GB made it an easy choice when my old Motorola Razor started experiencing a slow death.

Setup
In about 10 minutes, I had Exchange ActiveSync, Gmail, and voicemail all set up. That was all without even connecting to iTunes. After I connected to iTunes, it took about another 20 or 30 minutes for my music and podcast collection to copy over. The one thing I did not like about set up is that I could not use multiple contact lists. There were multiple options, but I could only pick one of them. I started with Exchange syncing my contacts wirelessly through ActiveSync and later switched to sync my Gmail contacts since the mail client pulls from the Active Directory anyway.

Wireless Data
Any time you are in the area of a WiFi hotspot, the iPhone asks if you'd like to connect. Since the University has WPA2 coverage for most of campus, I am able to use WiFi rather than the cell wireless data network. The same happens with our home network, and so I get really fast data speeds at both home and work.

App Store
Installing applications was pretty easy, but the store is quickly growing in size. The quality of applications available is going up, but they are getting harder and harder to locate in the noise. Word of mouth and blogs will probably be the best source to find the best applications. The nice thing is that you can install through iTunes or via the iPhone if you have a WiFi connection.

GPS
The map mode only uses the GPS when I am in a car or outside. The antenna is reportedly really short which means it needs to have good line of sight to the GPS satellites to calculate a position. When GPS is not available though, it will use cell tower triangulation or WiFi to estimate your position. This will probably work for most applications, but I think the potential for location-based services could be difficult to realize with the iPhone due to this limitation.

Interface
The really beautiful thing about the iPhone is the interface. Even if the App Store or GPS were perfect, I think the interface would make the iPhone a killer app in gadget form. The Safari web browser blows the Windows Mobile browser away completely. The ability to view pages exactly as they would in a normal web browser as well as being able to pinch to zoom in or out is so simple. The pinching to change zoom in various applications is very elegant. The fact that you can turn the iPhone on its side for it to auto-switch to "landscape" also makes viewing web pages or other wide applications a breeze. The flicking and scrolling capabilities are the finishing touches on an already simple interface. If I want to scroll through my contacts slowly, I can do that easily with a touch. If I want to jump down several pages of contacts, I use a flick instead. These seem like minor details, but they are just incredible in practice.

iPod
The iPhone works great as an iPod, and Apple really thought about the simple things to make it work well. While I was listening to some songs, I heard a beep to indicate I had a call. I clicked the headphone mic to answer it, and the music paused. When I ended my call, the music picked up again automatically. That seems simple, but it really is just another sign of Apple doing things right in the interface.

Battery
The battery is probably only good for a day if I do a lot with e-mail or web browsing. This will not usually be a major drawback, but I am sure it will annoy me extremely at some point.

Overall
If you use Exchange, use an iPod, and have the money available, I highly recommend getting an iPhone. I have dreams of what location-based computing will do, and I have hopes that the iPhone might start drive for location-based computing in the United States. For now though, I am extremely happy with the convergence offered in my iPhone. Before the iPhone 3G, I did not have an interest in the older iPhone model other than as a novelty, but now I feel like I made an excellent investment.