Jonathan Cusick

As nearly everyone knows the Apple iPhone went on sale in the US earlier this year (29/06/07) and received an incredible response. I was pleased that the iPhone UK release date was 09/11/07 and the carrier was O2 as O2 is my carrier and my contract was due for renewal in November. However with the O2 iPhone contract which is unlike other phone contracts where you get a phone for free instead the iPhone will set you back £269. This is a huge leap from getting a free phone and then there is the array of different contract tariffs, the contract I selected is £35 per month which lasts 18 months.

I was willing to pay the £269 as I knew what the phone had to offer and already managed to have a trial run on the device briefly in September thanks to a good friend who could not wait for the UK release and had their iPhone imported. My first impression was utter amazement, I was very impressed with the touch screen and wireless access which was much better than expected.

Consequently when I purchased my iPhone I was not disappointed and I feel that it was worth every penny of the £269 due to vast amount of features it has to offer the best of which in my opinion are the iPod and wireless internet access (a full list of the iPhone features can be found here).

The only small issue I did have with the iPhone for the first four days was with the on screen keyboard as I found that I kept hitting the wrong keys which proved to be rather irritating however after four days this was no longer an issue and I think it’s fantastic.

Overall after using the iPhone for over a week now I am very pleased with this introduction into the smart phone market and hope that apple continue to develop more phones in the future as well as upgrading the storage capacity, which for the UK iPhone was 8GB (I believe in the US there was also a 4GB version available on the launch day in addition to the 8GB version). Even though it is clearly an expensive device I found that it has already become extremely useful and means that I do not have to carry around my phone and iPod as two separate devices. Excellent!