The iPhone 3G is a truly amazing phone. I have used Windows mobile based phones for about the last 10 years since i dumped Nokia and although Windows Mobile is hugely flawed, it still represented the best choice for me ... until the iPhone 3G came along.

What's great about the iPhone 3G

(compared to WM 6.0 on HTC with orange)

• Slim, sexy, cool. This may sound odd - but for a suit wearer like me, a long wide but slim phone is far more practical than a chocolate bar phone. It sits neatly in the top pocket of shirts or suits and presses flat to the skin without twisting. You always feel the vibrate when you get a message or call.
• The UI is a dream with the flick to scroll, fast speed of operation and great reliabillty.
• Safari Web Browser is infinitely better than anything i've ever used on any mobile device of any kind.
• Keyboard. I needed convincing that a touch sensitive screen keyboard could compete with a real mini keyboard like the slide out one on my HTC but its just as good if not better and thats only after 2 days of familiarisation.
• Email handling. I was still struggling to get exchange push email working well on my HTC. With the iPhone, despite being a non-windows non-microsoft phone, it worked first time and is smooth as silk. You can also add multiple other POP3 accounts that run in parallel- which suits me perfectly.
• Camera is good (2.0M pixels is plenty for a phone).
• Photo browsing
• Music (iPod) features are great. Buy some Bose noise cancelling headphones if you want to experience music quality on the move like never before.

What's not so great

• No video recorder. I can't believe they've left this out. Must be because they intend to upsell this feature to make extra cash later although right now there's no video recorder app available for purchase.
• Can't currently use the same password vault application i was using (CodeWallet) although an iPhone version is under development by DeveloperOne. I'll wait because i can't begin the contemplate the hours of work it would take to transpose my passwords to a new app.
• No Word / Excel edit capabilities - not that i used this very much on the old phone.
• O2 coverage is not as good as Orange (where i live, work and spend my time).
• Third Party applications can only be installed via the conduit of the iTunes store. This is crazy. Steve Job loves to berate Microsoft but he's clearly a big hipocrit too.