One step farther into The Collective

I did it.  I've been iPhoned...sucked deeper into the Apple collective less than a month after getting my new iMac.  My Samsung Blackjack became available for hardware upgrade under my cell phone contract a couple of days before leaving for DragonCon (meaning I could avoid paying the outrageous full purchase price for the phone) and I made the move.  I was lucky enough to find an AT&T store that actually had some in stock (several people I know talked about 2-3 week waiting lists for these things), so I picked up the 18Gig version in black & chrome (of course).  

After being on the thing for a couple of weeks now I can say I am very very happy with it.  There are a good many sound critiques I can make about Apple, but the one thing I can never deny is that they know how to make a very user friendly consumer product and the iPhone is more proof of that.  The usability is amazingly simple, the phone doesn't even come with an instruction book because it doesn't need one, it is THAT intuitive.  The only thing I had to look up (via the online web manual, accessible via the phone) was how to setup voicemail.  It was really really simple to do (you have to call your cell phone number from the cell phone and it walks you through the setup), but it is the one thing that wasn't intuitively obvious from just tapping around on the phone.

So here is my summary of my iPhone experience thus far:

• The built in GPS & mapping via google maps is cool.
  
• The web browsing speed is snappy, and the large display is much better that the one on my Blackjack.
  
• To setup my email access all I had to do is click on Google as my provider, type in ID and password and I was all synced up (it uses IMAP protocol instead of POP).  Here again, the much larger display was nice to have.
  
• The phone has some sort of tilt sensor such that when you rotate the screen 90 degrees it will rotate and reformat the display on the fly.  Very nice for web browsing.
  
• The virtual keypad is nice, and deceptively easy to use.  Even though the keys look close together on the screen, I rarely have problems with the phone sensing the wrong key being tapped even when I'm sure I've fat fingered it.  I'm not sure how it manages this feat, the touch sensor is just incredible from my experience.  Your mileage may vary.
  
• There are apparently lots of free and for-pay widgets (applications) available for the phone and more being written everyday.  
• Managing your phone sync data using iTunes is weird, but it works easy enough.
• The voicemail interface allows you to select which specific voicemail you want to listen to via the virtual display instead of having to listen through all of them in sequence until you get to the one you want. 
• The screen is not pressure sensitive, it uses sensors to detect the electromagnetic field produced by your skin so you don't have to worry about random buttons being pushed as you slip it into your holster.  This was a really annoying problem with my Blackjack.