At Last, the iPhone.

On the other hand, Google Maps works wonderfully, taking full advantage of the touch screen, and integrating nicely with the phone function and even your contact list (you can instantly see where your friends live).  It will expertly route a trip for you and even clue you in on the traffic density.

The specially formatted YouTube videos work great on Wi-Fi, but can display in a lower quality when you're not at a hotspot and are using AT&T's EDGE network.  At launch, only a small percentage of the millions of video will have been reformatted to work with the phone.  (Fortunately for me, this included a couple of swell Amy Winehouse videos.) The fact is that YouTube without the long tail of hundreds of thousands of videos is barely worth the effort.  But Google and Apple promise that by fall the entire collection will be available for iPhone streaming, and that users will be able to fill up every idle moment with unproductive glory.

The calendar works as you'd hope, with a charming odometer-style way of setting the time of appointments. The 2-megapixel camera works decently (though I sometimes hit the shutter unintentionally).  It's easy to send a picture, make it your wallpaper or—this is neat—assign it to a contact.    (It would have been nicer to have one-touch posting to Flickr, Facebook, etc.)  Photo display is terrific, and using the Photos application you swipe from one picture to the next, and can watch in either vertical or landscape mode. Other programs, like the stock ticker, weather and calculator, are useful and visually pleasing, but not groundbreaking additions.

What about flaws? A lot of people considering the expensive plunge into iPhone-land have stated some specific worries, and two weeks of use has cast some light on these. First is the difficulty of using a virtual keyboard that pops up on the screen when it's time to enter text. The people at Apple rhapsodize about the intelligent keyboard. Steve Jobs boasted that he's pretty good at two-thumb typing, and several others at Apple claim that they are just as proficient as a Blackberry power user.  So far, I'm nowhere close.   It took me a couple of days to get used to hitting the right keys using a single finger.  Maybe I'm a spaz, but I'm only beginning to get the hang of two-thumb typing.  I am impressed, though, with the iPhone's ability to correct misspellings, and I've had the best results by blasting through despite my mistakes and relying on the intelligence built into the system to correct my errors.   That said, I think that for most consumers the keyboard issue may be overblown.  People who see smart phones mainly as e-mail devices are a subset of the much broader audience Apple is trying to reach. If you are considering a phone primarily to monitor and reply to mail, you may stick to your Blackberry.

Others were worried that the battery would wear out after a couple hours of use.   I found that unless I did a lot of video watching or Web browsing, I could generally last the day, and then charge it overnight.    One day I purposely ran the battery down; the iPhone winked out after 14 hours, including six hours of talking, Web-browsing, music-listening and the viewing of an episode of "Weeds."

One more intractable problem is Apple's decision to use the slower EDGE data network, as opposed to a faster 3G net.  (As partial compensation the iPhone is designed to find the fastest network, especially Wi-Fi hotspots.) The EDGE network actually has two speeds, and when you're on the slower one, Web pages load up with what feels like dial-up speed.