At Last, the iPhone.

Phone.   Did I mention that you can make phone calls with this thing? The iPhone has an excellent implement of state-of-the-art features like integrating contacts with the phone function. Plus, the phone allows you to merge up to five conversations into a conference, and a great feature called Visual Voicemail lets you view on screen all the voice messages left for you to play back in the order you choose. Apple also includes a special version of their white earbuds with a tiny microphone on one wire.  Those buds don't fit my ears well, but there will be plenty of third-party alternatives.   I tried the Bluetooth-enabled Jawbone headset, as well as a Shure headphone adapter with a microphone along with its noise-blocking earbuds.

Another nice touch: when the phone is at your cheek, the screen goes dormant.  But when you lower the phone to tap in some numbers in a voice mail system, the screen reappears to take in your input.  You can also play with other applications while you talk. (One weird effect: if you've been using the iPhone a lot it feels warm on your cheek.  Not laptop-catch-on-fire hot. But still.) A quibble: Apple offers a range of nice if not show-stopping ring tones, but wouldn't it have been awesome if the iPhone let you choose snippets of songs in your iTunes library as ringtones?

E-mail.  The best thing about the way this handles e-mail is that the message content shows up vividly.  It nicely manages JPEGs, HTML and PDFs.  (The iPhone can also open Word and Excel attachments, though you can't edit them.)   In short, e-mail looks more like you're working on a computer than a clunky phone.  I had some problems with one of my accounts—sometimes the mail was blocked, other times it wouldn't send outgoing mail.  Apple looked into it and told me that it has something to do with my ISP blocking Port 25. Their engineers suggested a fix and said that this was something that would probably be addressed in an update. Still, this is an explanation someone paying $500 for an e-mail device shouldn't have to hear. It remains to be seen whether corporate information technology specialists will embrace the iPhone for their users.   Because the iPhone has to prove itself as easy to use as RIM's breakout hit (see my notes on keyboarding below), it's going to be an uphill climb for Apple to pry the devices away from the Crackberry-heads, even if Blackberry mail is ugly by comparison.

iPod.  Jobs calls the iPhone the "best iPod we ever made."   It's certainly the one that most beautifully displays videos and movies, and it's fun to turn the iPod sideways and see "cover flow," the array of album covers already familiar to iTunes users.   Also, the new way of navigating—swiping down your song list or fast-browsing by skimming your finger on a vertically arranged alphabet on the right of the screen—is a superior interface.   But the best iPod?   Workout lovers will want to keep their Nanos and Shuffles for the gym.  And heavy music users accustomed to 30 or 80 gigabytes of storage will be unhappy at the limited capacity of the iPhone.  (Of the 8 gigs on my iPhone, I now have 669 songs, one three-hour movie, three half-hour television episodes, 361 photos, and a bit of "other," meaning e-mail and contacts.  It's almost full.)  Possibly, those considering an iPhone might be daunted at the idea of having to carry it around in addition to their current iPod.  Also, I was disappointed that Apple didn't implement a way to buy songs or videos directly from the iPhone—you have to synch them from iTunes on a PC first. What's the use of having Wi-Fi on an iPod if you can't go to the iTunes store?

Safari.  Web-browsing is where the iPhone leaves competitors in the dust.  It does the best job yet of compressing the World Wide Web on a palm-size device. The screen can nicely display an entire Web page, and by dragging, tapping, pinching and stretching your fingers you can zero in on the part of the page you want to read.    Web pages you wouldn't dare go to on other phones are suddenly accessible, though those that require Flash, Windows Media or Real Media formats won't work.   A clear, very readable implementation of bookmarks helps you get to your favorites without typing.

Other Applications.  It's very simple to send SMS text messages with Apple's custom application—identify the contact and type the message as you do with Apple's iChat app.  It can also get very expensive—simply typing "yo" qualifies as one of the 200 SMS messages that come with your plan. (You can pay for extra texting.)  It's disappointing that Apple didn't include an instant messaging application for the iPhone that easily lets you use AIM or other services.   There are Web workarounds (I used a beta version of Heysan, a mobile instant messaging service) but they are nowhere near as what Apple would have done if it had used its skills to simply port iChat to the iPhone.