After a couple weeks of talking to my twitter peeps I finally just decided to take the plunge and get an iPhone. And actually I’ve given it thought off and on for about a year. There are a couple people I know who own them and I was curious why they went into a trance every time I asked about it. “Ooooh you have to get one!” “If you do you’ll never go back!”

Back from where??

Maybe the rants and raves of apple fans made me move more slowly towards becoming an owner of an Apple product. More slowly because I had a secret fear that maybe they were just high. Now I know that I was right and wrong … at the same time.

Here’s why …

I went online to the At&t store and made the purchase, deciding to go with the 8GB since my music collection is pretty minimal and I don’t imagine I’ll have a huge stock of videos that I can’t leave home without. And 8GB because–hey– I’m not that huge of an Apple fan yet and maybe I should just put my toe in the water first. I mean 16GB? What’s that going to hold, like a million songs or something analogous to that? No, I’ll go with the 8GB please. And then maybe I will upgrade later … IF this whole thing works out of course.

And did it ever …

My phone finally arrived after 3 days shipping that left me checking the order status online over and over. Curiosity was strong and the general urge to test out the new gadget. It could have been a coffee grinder for all I cared, it was a gadget to be used and explored and tested. How good can an iPhone be?

Good. Very good. No, amazingly good!

After a brief time charging, the phone was ready to turn on and get rolling. So I hooked up to iTunes as instructed and got the phone activated.

Wow … just wow!

Two words for you: user experience.

The user experience of an iPhone is over the top amazing. It’s fun to scroll from app to app, and there is no sinking “i just can’t do what I want to do with this”. In fact, I’m continually incredulous at the things I CAN do.

Stuff like being able to be logged into all my gmail accounts at once. You have just one? Well good for you but I have at least 5 that I log into just about every day and what a pain to log in and log out in order to log in to the next account. I can just download them into a mail application you say? Yeah and lump them all together in one inbox, which I don’t want. But no, the iPhone allows me to check all of them and they are separate for me so I know what each one is about. Love that!

Then there’s the problem of having two Twitter accounts.

OK so your life isn’t interesting enough to share your daily thoughts with others? Fine, but let the rest of us meet on Twitter and converse …

It was not hard to find a Twitter app that lets me stay logged into both and switch back and forth.

Can’t do that on my laptop …

Plus, I hate logging into Facebook. Don’t really know why it just seems to be too long and complicated. But my iPhone allows me to quickly check and respond to messages and chat just like my laptop, without the hassle.

That’s 3 things I love …

And how about the whole “superfast internet anywhere anytime” thing? That’s sort of taken for granted but it adds a lot to the experience.

But there is a certain overall feel to the iPhone as well as the way you scroll and move from place to place. It’s just acts like it should, almost like it knows what I want. OK I do have to use my fingers but it reacts exactly like it should.

That’s what adds the wow factor. The entire experience is what it should be.

Next … Macbook Pro?? Overpriced?

Now I’m not so sure.

Windows Vista has a lot of visual appeal that previous versions of Windows didn’t have.

The default wallpapers are stunning and the icons have been given a major overhaul.

There is also a new sidebar that looks really cool;

These are from a default installation of Vista. There are also many cool themes that have been created as third-party add-ons. I don’t really care if they integrate with Vista well or not, technically speaking. But a later post will show you the ones I consider the most beautiful.