The New iPhone, Yep, It Pretty Much Rocks

So after spending most of my weekend in activation hell (see Slashdot for more on that) with Apple/AT&T (CNET is reporting by the way that the *real* culprit in all of that might be a company called Synchronoss who reportedly had the contract for activations with Apple/AT&T and is "extremely pleased" with the way the iPhone activations went), I've finally been able to spend part of the last 12 hours or so playing around with the iPhone and, yep, it pretty much rocks.

There are of course much better and earlier reviews than mine so I'm not going to go into a lot of depth, but here are the top 10 things that I like about my new iPhone.

1. The battery life seems to be very strong. I listened to music for about 45 minutes on the way to work this morning. Made a few phone calls, watched a few YouTube videos, took some photos, added a few entries into the address book, etc. and all of this activity doesn't seem to have made a dent in the battery. I have a feeling that even with very heavy use you are going to be able to keep a good charge on this thing.

2. I love how you can set a photo to person in your contact book and then a huge photo of their face pops up when caller ID identifies that it is them.

3. The photos from the camera a very useable. I'm not trading my Canon 5D in anytime soon, but for a camera in your pocket both the picture taking process and the results shine.

4. The phone synched really well with my Mac. All of my contacts from my address book are now on it and my 5 star rated songs are moved over.

5. I love how responsive it is to touch. the iPhone seems to get this really right. Pinch the screen and it gets bigger or smaller. slide your finger across the screen and it moves up or down.

6. The screen is amazingly vivid and bright. Visually it's a delight.

7. The phone is amazingly intuitive. I gave it to my 5 year old son William and he was quickly able to navigate it. The single button design to return you to the homepage just feels right and the sliders are natural.

8. Great having touch volume controls on both the interface and on the side of the phone. As an iPod it works really well. Great volume. While driving I could easily reach down move the volume up and down by touch.

9. Great speaker quality. I wouldn't say that listening to music outloud on the speaker is how you'd use this phone mostly, but the sound quality is very strong for a tiny phone. Songs kind of like a.m. radio, but definitely doable.

10. High quality YouTube videos. Of course much of this is copyrighted material, but the selection quality is high (I just finished watching Johnny Cash's "Hurt" video), the videos seem to stream over Edge just fine but sometimes do take longer to load.

What don't I like? Well besides the hated activation process, the internet and Google Maps do feel a bit slow. I played around on Zooomr with it for a little while which was cool, but I'm not sure I'd ever have the patience to be a heavy iPhone internet user.

I'm also not crazy about the keyboard. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but I seem to make a lot of errors when typing. The keys feel really small and with the touch screen it seems pretty easy to mistype characters.

All in all though this is the best phone I've ever had/used. I'm very happy with my purchase and would recommend this phone to anyone who might be considering it.

Oh, I bought the 8GB model which I think is the one to get. For $100 more it just seems worth it to have that much more flexibility. Piper Jaffray has an analyst report that's making it's way around the internet this morning that says 95% of iPhone buyers in San Francisco, New York and Minneapolis purchased the 8GB model. Apparently over 500,000 of them were sold over the weekend.