iReview my iPhone

Typing with your thumbs on the on-screen keyboard takes some getting used to, but the software that is included helps a lot. If you can overcome the urge to backspace and correct your typos, the software takes over and fixes most mistakes surprisingly well, particularly if the mistake is hitting the key next to the letter you want. It also learns new words that you type, and the dictionary it uses is impressive. (It even knows the curse words.)

As you're typing, a small bubble window pops up above the cursor with a suggested word based on what you have typed so far. To accept the suggested word, all you have to do is hit the space bar or any punctuation. Now that I am trusting the keyboard, typing is about as easy as it was on my Treo.

The keyboard itself is smartly designed. It only appears when you need it, so there is no wasted space when you don't need it. There are also different versions of the keyboard depending on what you are doing. If you are typing in the address bar of the web browser, for example, there are "/" and ".com" buttons in place of the usual space bar. The qwerty keyboard includes the letters, space bar, caps button (an up-arrow), backspace, and return, as well as a button labeled ".?123" to toggle to another keyboard with numbers and punctuation. Another button on this second keyboard toggles to a third keyboard with less common punctuation options. It all sounds cumbersome but works quite well.

You can't cut, copy, or paste on the iPhone, which seems like a pretty basic function to be missing, but so far I haven't missed it.

Internet browsing works very well. Some people (mostly those with no iPhone, I think) have complained about the iPhone using AT&T's EDGE network instead of the faster G3 service. I think as a reason not to get an iPhone this is a little ridiculous. Sure, faster is always better, and browsing on the iPhone in my car is not as fast as on the DSL-connected laptop in my living room, but it's still a whole lot faster than the full internet browser I had on my last phone (that would be none). I have been using the iPhone for internet browsing pretty extensively, and slow-loading pages have not really been a problem.

There is a software bug that sometimes causes the browser to close suddenly and unexpectedly, which kicks you out to the main menu. This has happened to me only a few times, but others on iPhone forums have complained of more frequent browser crashes. Advice on the forums is to clear the cache or reboot the phone, which seems to help for those who are seeing frequent crashes. Annoying as it is when it happens, it is so rare (for me, at least) and easily recovered that it has not been a big deal.

For the most part email works well, but there is room for improvement. The setup is pretty simple, particularly if your email provider is Yahoo!, Gmail, .mac, or AOL, all of which are already configured and require only your email address and password to set up. Setting up other email accounts means finding out the server information from your provider, and some mail types will not work at all with the email interface. A big surprise for a lot of people is that you cannot set up a Hotmail account (Unless you have a paid Hotmail account, and most users don't.), although you can still access it through the internet browser.

The email application has two major flaws. Incoming mail is not synchronized with the server, so even email that you have already read on your computer will show up on the iPhone as unread. This might not be a big deal except for the second flaw, which is that it is tedious to delete mail from the inbox on the iPhone. There is no way to select multiple emails, and deleting them individually means waiting for the iPhone to keep up while you either tap twice from the inbox list or view each email individually and tap once. This gets old really fast.

Apart from deleting every email individually, and assuming your email account is compatible, the iPhone's email application is otherwise easy to use and problem free.

The maps might be the coolest feature on the iPhone, even though it's not the most frequently used. The iPhone uses Google maps. If you have never used Google maps, particularly when you are out on the road away from home and decide you need Starbucks, now, then you are missing out. Type "Starbucks" followed by a city or ZIP code and click search, and up pops a street map with little red push pins showing all your options. Tap the screen to zoom in or out or pan around, or tap a push pin to get an individual location's phone number, street address, and web address. It works great and quickly becomes indispensable. You can also switch a map to a satellite view, which is kind of useless but really cool.