On Friday I bought an iPhone 3G. I was expecting Vodafone in the city mall to have sold out of their stock because their store was almost empty (of people) at about 1PM. It turned out that they had moved all of their 16GB units but had plenty of the 8GB models so I picked one of them up. I figured that my 4GB iPod isn't full so I won't need the extra 8GBs anyway and that's the only difference.

Unlike the American consumers, I had no difficulty activating my phone when I got it back to the office. It synced all my contacts, calendars, mail and browser bookmarks automatically, which I expected - I was plugging it into a Mac after all.

The initial applications that are available through the App Store are not that impressive; it's mostly gimmicks that show off the funcionality of the iPhone without providing much real usefulness. Other than the light saber application of course.

So what do I think? My response to that question all weekend has been "it's great!" I do have two gripes, which turned out to be one gripe and one "ahh, I was doing it wrong." PC World has ten, if you want more reasons not to buy an iPhone.

My first complaint is that the QWERTY keyboard you've given on screen in the SMS application has the [send] button right where the backspace is on a real keyboard. That's meant that a few times this weekend people got half-messages when I accidently sent then instead of correcting them. The solution to this problem is simple: send more messages and learn where the buttons are over time.

The second issue I had was with the keyboard again, and takes two parts. Firstly, you can't flip it sideways on some applications (PC World brought this up too). Secondly, because I have man-fingers I tend to type some keys wrong. But I learnt that it doesn't matter! I can type away, making all kinds of mistakes and the auto-correct feature will fix up what I meant. It takes the surrounding keys and works out if you were probably meaning something else. For example: if I want to type "peesentstion" if knows I meant "presentation." Hitting the space bar acknowledges that you want the auto-corrected text so it ends up working really, really well when you know what to do. I spent too long trying to be careful and backspacing when the iPhone would have fixed all my fuxk upd.

See what I did there?

Sure the camera is only 2 megapixel, but Tony takes all my photos anyway. It can't record video, but I only ever record 20 second noise clips when I'm off my dial at a dance party (which I never re-watch) so that doesn't matter.

I am hanging out for a good terminal application to make this complete: where's Putty for the iPhone?