I've been playing with my iPhone for about a week now, and let me just say this and get it over with. This is the best phone I have ever used. Also for those of you reading this in India, the iPhone works perfectly here. Unlocking it takes about 20 mins and a WiFi network connected to the Internet. It was a great relief to see "INA Airtel" on the screen for the first time! This is an amazing device, especially considering that it is the very first phone made by Apple. Most of the features are implemented really well. The major complaints are regarding the features they left out. Some of which are:

• Bluetooth is restricted to only headsets. No file transfer, Bluetooth GPS etc.
• It doesn't shoot any video.
• It doesn't mount as a disk and so you can't store your files on it. Hacks are available to do this. You can of course, sync your video, audio and image files as long as they are in the standard iPod formats.
• The browser does not have the Flash plug-in. I didn't think I could really browse the web on a mobile device until the iPhone. I've tried the browsers on the Sony Ericsson P1i, Nokia N95 and Opera Mini 3 and 4 on various JavaME phones. The iPhone is a class apart. Flash support would make the experience complete.
• No MMS. I personally don't mind this a whole lot since I've almost never used this feature anyway. Email is the way to go on the iPhone.

Now all of the above features can probably be coming in a software update in the near future. With the iPhone SDK being released in February, we should also be able to get some great third-party applications to fill in the remaining gaps. The iPhone may never be as open as a phone with Google's Android Mobile OS, but its probably the best we have for now. Besides the brilliant user interface and software in general, there are some small things that are really nice to have.

• You can open and read all kind of mail attachments including PDF, Excel and Word files.
•  Even my grandmother can happily flick through a bunch of photos. Its amazing how easy and how much fun that is.
• The SMS interface is displayed like a chat or IM conversation. This is much more natural than the kind of Email displays in all phones.
• The iPhone charging dock comes with a line-out which you can connect to an amplifier or music system. Enjoy your tunes on the big speakers which watching the album art on your iPhone.

The first gadget I used to head for every morning was my laptop. Well now its in second place. :-)