[Buzzygirl]

I spent about four hours of my weekend playing with the iPhone. My boyfriend bought an iPhone the day after the price went down by $200 US. The iPhone is a cool device and it does a lot of things, but at a very steep price, even after the $200 price drop.

I watched the entire movie "Cars" and two documentary films, and was delighted by the clarity, color and crispness of the images. The phone itself sounds fantastic; the cell transmissions are clear and bright, not at all "tinny" and hollow like the sound through most cell phones.

However, the headphone jack is slightly recessed, so it will not work with just any set of headphones. My boyfriend has a great set of Bose headphones, but he couldn't get them to plug into the recessed port of the iPhone. He actually had to strip about .5 cm of insulation off the base of the plug before it would fit into the headphone jack. What kind of crap is that?? Apple wants even more money for proprietary accessories, that's what!

The touch-type keypad is very annoying and hard to get used to. Once you're out of WiFi range, the "Edge" function kicks in-- that's AT&T's Internet service, presumably piggybacked onto their cellphone towers-- and it is painfully slow.

iPhone has built-in PDA functions, but contains nothing that really stands out from any other PDA with an address book, calculator, and so on. It has a weather-widget and one-button access to YouTube-- I could think of about a hundred other things that'd be more useful than a dedicated YouTube button, but then I don't work for Apple. There is still no built-in FM radio, and no voice recorder/voice playback. I don't know about others, but I actually use both those features on my player.

The iPhone is certainly a cool gadget and has lots of cache with the public, yet when the day's done, it's still an Apple product, and thus its owners are locked into iTunes DRM for content and AT&T for phone service.

Still looking around for the ultimate MP3/4 player that works with Linux!!