Bottom Line: The Apple iPhone is a revolutionary phone not in its feature list, but in the way it packages those features. For the right person, there is nothing better than this phone on the market.

Verdict: Highly Recommended

There are many reviews of the Apple iPhone on the net, many of which are frighteningly long and detailed. This review aims to focus on the bottom line. Everyone’s seen the iPhone ads on TV and seen Apple’s latest wundergadget writing emails, browsing photos, surfing the net, playing music, playing videos, displaying maps, and (of course) making and answering phone calls.

Here’s a quick summary: The iPhone does a few things better than any other smartphone out there, in large part due to its massive touchscreen. Photos are sharp and well saturated on this screen. It’s easy to browse a large library of music with the sweep of a finger, and the iPhone has much more capacity for storage than other smartphones. Web browsing is a dramatically better experience that is almost as good as using a desktop computer. Small widgets like stocks and weather seem so obvious, its a wonder no one thought of them earlier. Complex call management like managing multiple simultaneous calls (merging, holding calls, switching between callers) and voicemail are similarly a dramatic step forward. The virtual keyboard, a concern of many used to the tactile microkeyboards on Treos and Blackberry’s, was surprisingly usable. Though it takes about a week to get the hang of it, I now find it superior to my Treo’s keyboard. A surprising advantage: the lack of physical keys makes it more comfortable to use for an extended period of time. AT&T’s service so far seems better than the T-Mobile service I’m coming from, but this varies regionally and could be a dealbreaker for some.

If you are a regular cell phone and iPod user and have longed to merge the two, the iPhone is likely to be both a better phone than your phone and a better iPod than your iPod.

The iPhone has some small, but real, deficiencies that may prompt you to wait for a future model:

• it has no MMS support (though does support e-mail)
• it does not yet support corporate Outlook servers that are behind a firewall
• it has a decent, but barebones 2 megapixel camera
• it supports EDGE, rather than the faster (and more power-hungry) HSDPA data network
• the WiFi functionality does not support 802.1x “Enterprise” security
• AT&T (formerly Cingular) is the only supported network

I found EDGE to be quite usable when I was not in Wifi range, particularly given that I could actually browse the pages once they were downloaded (the Treo managed to mangle many in its attempt to reformat them, and often gave up completely). The other limitations are real, but I found them to be minor. Lack of corporate email support is the biggest limitation that hopefully will be addressed in a future software update.

Yes, there will be a new iPhone down the line which will be better, but there will be a new one after that as well. The initial model is suprisingly robust, and most deficiencies should be addressed with software updates. For now, the iPhone is dramatically better than any other smartphone I’ve seen. It removes so many of the frustrations I experienced with the Treo. Is it really worth suffering with yesterday’s technology to wait for the next revision? My answer is no.