My neighbor Jeff is agonizing over buying an iPhone. He's post an iPhone Lust-O-Meter on his blog. He should enter the iPhone giveaway that my wife has running on her organization's web site.

Here are some other random notes:

• I've spent most of my time in Safari. Browsing web pages is a joy using the zooming and panning. Too bad there's no Flash support. But Javascript, DHTML and AJAX work pretty well. AJAX heavy sites like Flickr work great.
• The virtual keyboard takes A LOT of patience and practice, but is usable.
• Hiptop Nation often crashes Mobile Safari because of all the photos. The browser goes black and drops you back out to the start page of icons.
• Everything about the phone functions--except Visual Voicemail--is mediocre. The speakerphone volume is surprisingly weak given that you can drive the speaker pretty loud when playing music or videos.
• Mail app is bare bones. I discovered it doesn't import attached Vcards. If my company supports connecting to Exchange Server, I'll wonder if I can do stuff like manage Outlook appointments.
• The built-in camera captures good quality images, and performs surprisingly well in low light. I'm still mystified as to why there isn't a decent flash and self-portrait mirror built in.
• The included photo gallery app only displays photos at screen resolution, even though they are captured much higher. The demos that show the finger pinch zooming in are bogus in that the zoom only magnifies the screen rez photo--you can see it get pixely very quickly. Also, the system only attaches the screen rez image when sending a photo as a email attachment. This means there is no way to email the 2mp native images into sites like Flickr. You have to sync with iTunes and post from the desktop.
• The YouTube app was fun for a while, but I found that even at 10,000 videos, I got tired of what was there after an hour or two. You can NOT search full YouTube or see your own YouTube vids.
• It's really nice having a built-in mono speaker for listening to podcasts.
• In the iPod mode, I couldn't find a way to random access an audio track while it was playing. You can do this with videos tho.
• Like many others have said, it's annoying that you need an adapter to use third-party headphones. I have noise cancelling headphones for which I'll need to pack yet another adapter.
• The iPhone hardware build quality is outstanding. Though the screen does accumulate finger grease quickly, being made of glass will keep it scratch free for a long time to come. The steel rim of the screen and metal back bezel are solid and scuff resistent too. I already dropped my iPhone once onto the floor at a bar. Fortunately, the floor was wooden, so no harm at all. I'm currently using a leather folio belt case made by Incase.
• The backlight for the screen is set at "half" brightness at the factory. It looked fine at that setting, much brighter than the Sidekick screen at max. You can pump it up to blindingly bright, presumably for better visibility in bright sunlight.
  
  

One of the best iPhone reviews I've seen to date is on Engadget.

- mike lee - happy 4th - wheaton, md