I have had my new iPhone 3G for a little over a week now and I absolutely love it. As some people have noted, the OS on the phone does seem a tad glitchy. I think Apple may have rushed the SDK enabled OS out the door. That being said, I fully expect any minor issues to be fixed with simple software updates. Enough about the issues, on to what makes it the best phone I have ever had…

The iPhone 3G is the best phone that I have ever had. Now, I am not much of a gadget junky, so I have only owned a few smart phones, and that name was a complete misnomer for them. My first foray into the smart phone world was around 2003 with the Motorola MPX220. This phone worked well enough as a phone, but the limitations of the “smart” aspects of the phone left me wishing I hadn’t spent so much money on it. In fact, the phone completely turned me off to the whole smart phone scene. While the phone hinted at the glorious future of a workable mobile computing platform in a phone, it delivered none of it.

My next adventure in smart phone land began in 2007 when my employer decided to provide a number of us with a Nextel/BlackBerry 7100i. This is perhaps the worst phone I have ever seen. It is large and bulky and quite simply doesn’t work. If the phone isn’t answered within the first nano-second of a ring, it goes to voicemail. The email functionality via a corporate BlackBerry server again leaves me wishing for more. When an email is deleted on my desktop, it still shows up on my BlackBerry. The synchronization does not work as well I would like. Also, the web browser is decent, but certainly not perfect. Oh, and it has PTT which is perhaps the single largest hindrance to communication that mankind has ever invented. Why, when it is completely possible to engage in a duplex conversation would anyone opt for simplex? The phone does have a couple of nice features though. It has a good speakerphone and the battery lasts forever, probably due to it’s massive size.

So, on to the iPhone and why it is so nice. First off, the “phone” is rock solid. Calls are clear and the sound quality is really good. I think any smart phone needs to focus on being a phone first and “smart” second. I carry this thing around with me because it is a phone, not because I can read my email on it. “Smart” is a bonus, the phone is a necessity. That being said, the “smart” in the iPhone is really smart, genius level smart. The UI is very intuitive, Apple must have poured money into the development of the UI on this phone.

Perhaps the single greatest feature of the iPhone is also the one that I think about the least, the touch screen. So much of my time is spent focusing on the content being presented that I quite frankly ignore the technological marvel that is the iPhone’s touch screen. Actually, until I began writing this, I hadn’t given the touch screen a second thought. That is truly the hallmark of a great design, I don’t ever think about it. Since the moment I bought it, I have swiped, typed, pinched, scrolled and cursored my way across that screen a million times without ever thinking about the way it works. It works so well, it is so intuitive and natural to use that I simply forget about it while using it.

The last thing that I will write about in this installment are the applications on the iPhone. The whole iPhone and Apple community were up in arms over the lack of native application development support on the original iPhone, so Apple began working on an SDK equipped version of the OS for the second generation of the iPhone. While Apple certainly has delivered, I am not so sure that they wanted to do this. When the first generation iPhone was released, Steve Jobs touted the phones fully functional web browser as the sole target for iPhone development. I think this was a brilliant move and, while not sad to see native applications, I do think that the existence of the SDK will detract from the web based development on the iPhone. Of the few applications I have downloaded so far (Last.fm, Sudoku and Twitterific) I only really use Soduku. I do however use the web applications I have added many times a day. I currently have Digg, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Hahlo on my main screen. These “web apps” work flawlessly and I am truly impressed with them. I think that Apple was correct with their 3rd party development strategy for the first generation iPhone. Limiting development to web apps, while certainly constraining was also the way of the future. I hope that the existence of the SDK doesn’t mean that web app developers will lose momentum.