As a new iphone user my main motive for having one was the ipod and phone combination. My previous mp3 player died last summer and i found the new itunes + shop very easy and organised to use. I was fully aware that having this great combination was gonna mean sacrifice. ie: what i (and most people) see as the norm in todays standards of mobile phones - mms, stereo bluetooth sending contacts, forwarding texts etc. But with all this due to be onboard this will be a major conrtributing factor to Apple's dominance of the smartphone market.

I recently spent all week demoing other smart phones, Pixon, renour, new 5800, g1 and the storm. None of these phones had the simplity and amazing user friendly feel as the iphone and i am certainly not a fanboy. Althouigh they all had the ability to play music and pretty good too, i still felt the ipod part of the iphone easy to use.I generally dont favour devices that arent easy to use and not compatible with other devices. Some of these were very good devices but i kept finding screens sticking or having to press more than once to activate a widget. The iphone will at last meet almost all my needs as a music lover and a mobile phone user. T he only real downfall of the iphone is the daily charging procedure.. A better battery would make this great device unbeatable. One happy customer (and previous anti apple & sony diehard critic)  

I agree that the other touchscreen phones have nowhere near the fluidity of the iphone at the moment but this is about to change. As soon as the Google and WinMo 6.5 get going as well as the awesome looking Palm Pre the current IPhone will be old hat. The phone itself is good but after using my friends I just found it too gimmicky, I need buttons, especially for drunken texting and I have got so good at the predictive texting I can do it blind folded, try doing that with a touch screen phone!!

I feel that this was far from the revolution that many people expected and that in fact just brought the iphone up to a standard that people think it should have been on day one. The lack of copy and paste up until this summer is inexcusable on what is aimed at being a user friendly device. Although i agree that the iphone is an amazing user-friendly device until this version of the software is released if you play around with it for more than a few days the cracks in its seemingly impenetrable armour begin to show. Having to scroll through several home screen's to find required apps, lack of MMS is just obscure and stereo bluetooth on a music based device is in my opinion beyond a joke.  

But it still has a rubbish camera and still no video recording - when that changes it will become 'all that', until then it's an iPod Touch with minimal extras.