I bought an iPhone a couple of weeks ago.

Turns out you can get them working on Prepay after all (even though Vodafone won’t tell you that), and with a new casual data rate of $1 for up to 10MB of data on any given day, I couldn’t resist.

The thing is quite brilliant, really. The touch screen is versatile but intuitive and you don’t need a manual to figure out how to use it. The iTunes service becomes far more appealing and interesting when you can browse it casually wherever you are. The App Store is already home to some very cool pieces of software (and some not so cool). Safari works very well, even if it’s missing the Flash plugin. The touch-screen QWERTY keyboard is brilliant. The camera quality is more than good enough, even with its complete lack of stability correction. Photo browsing is great and so is the iPod.

The phone has quickly become my TV Guide, my weather report, my morning news report reader, my Auckland city map book, my home stereo, my walkman and my car stereo… and - less importantly - my phone!