After patiently waiting for my contract on my Samsung Blackjack to expire, then repeatedly being turned away from Vodafone stores right across the Gold Coast due to severely low stock – I finally managed to get my hands on a white 16Gb iPhone 3GS toward the beginning of October 2009. Not long after I got one in my hot hands, I gave a pithy review and said that they rock but that there was more to come – here are a few more thoughts.

1. High Quality Screen
   While using my Blackjack mobile phone, I thought the quality of the screen was actually quite good. Of course, as soon as I bought my Apple iPhone, it highlighted just how poor the screen quality was by comparison.
2. Kick Arse Interface
   Probably a little subjective, not everyone gels with the iPhone OS user interface and usability. Fortunately for me, it fits with me just nicely and I find it really efficient to move around and the user experience of multi-speed scrolling lists, varying length touch sensitivity and more make it a joy to use.
3. Richer Applications
   My Samsung Blackjack had a really good spread of applications and was really, quite a capable phone. The difference with the iPhone is that the market place is open and thousands of developers around the world are investing their energy building applications for the Apple App Store – which means that there is probably an existing application to do what you want and it’ll be free or low cost.
4. Photos
   While I did take photos with my Blackjack, it was generally an after thought. The quality of the images weren’t that fantastic and viewing them on the phone using such a mediocre quality screen just compounded the issue. Fortunately the iPhone 3GS has a 3.5″ screen with a resolution of 480×320 pixels and provides good quality colour reproduction – makes viewing photos that much nicer.
5. Video
   Over the 2 or more years that I owned the Samsung Blackjack, I think I used the video feature less often than I used it to take photos – which means basically never. Compare that against my ongoing use of the video capturing on the iPhone and it is a stark contrast. The single greatest thing about having reasonable quality video and audio recording ability on the iPhone is that you can capture a lot more things than you could normally. While the video quality certainly doesn’t rival our full HD camcorder, the iPhone is infinitely more accessible – in that you have it with you nearly all the time – which makes it great for capturing impromptu moments.
6. Ubiquitous Web Access
   The Samsung Blackjack was a 3G capable phone with internet browsing capabilities. However, I virtually didn’t bother using the internet as the user experience was so poor. The physical screen was small, screen quality and colour reproduction wasn’t that great and the compatibility of the web browser itself wasn’t fantastic. Since buying my Apple iPhone, I now use the internet regularly – often more than once per day, I have my various personal and work email’s delivered to it as well and because the uses the Apple web browser Safari, which is standards compliant – virtually all web sites just work out of the box.

I could probably go on and on about why I think the iPhone is a great phone, but I honestly think it transcends a simple phone handset now. It is positioning itself as a hyper mobile personal computer, as the raw device is very capable, quite feature rich and with a staggering ecosystem of applications just a click away – there isn’t a lot it can’t do.

Without a doubt, it is the best mobile phone I have ever owned and it wins by a significant margin.