I've had my iPhone for a couple of weeks now, and I love it. Since I'm taking a break from work, I thought I'd jot down the reasons why.
I use the iPhone less as a phone and more as a mini-computer. I expected this, as I've never been big on talking on the phone, but the iPhone is much more useful than I ever anticipated.
All my contacts and calendar items on synced between my iPhone and laptop, which is so incredibly convenient I can't put it into words. In Japan, where I'm spending most of my time these days, you have to enter every single contact and all the contact details into your phone manually, and the phones generally keep the contact details in the order in which you entered them, not in alphabetical order or any other easily sortable order. So with thousands of contacts (and more every day), I'd have to spend years entering data, which meant I never entered data into my previous phone and never had any contact information available.
On top of this, from my phone now, I can access email, sms, IM, skype, twitter and facebook; I have photo albums so I can show people photos from recent trips; I have podcasts that I watch and listen to for up-to-date news and information; I've got reference applications for time zones, dictionaries, unit conversions and the like; the list goes on and on.
The phone's functionality is constantly being extended with apps too. My favourite apps right now are eReader and Stanza for reading ebooks, Instapaper for filing away online articles to read offline, NatsuLion for updating Twitter, and Fring for using Skype.
The bottom line is that my iPhone is increasing my productivity and helping me to keep in touch with everyone. And it just looks so damn good too.
Like many other people though, I'm hoping Apple will incorporate cut-and-paste functionality and horizontal typing for email and sms soon.