My last phone (Samsung pixon m8800) drove me crazy! one of the worst phones I have ever owned and my first touch screen! I vowed never to buy another touch screen again.. within 6 months I was searching for a new phone and i still had another 12 months left on the contract!! I noticed very quickly that touch screen phones were quickly becoming the norm and all over the place.. I was still at this point never! It was when a friend of mine showed me his HTC touch screen and it was amazing compared to mine. So i took the option to research and look at what i really wanted in a phone.

I wanted it mostly to be simple and easy to use! now i dont mind things a little complicated i like trying to work things out. but on a phone.. i just want it to work for me not me have to work it for it if you get what i mean.. I also wanted to be able to do many before me have been doing for a while now and thats enjoy the options that 3rd party apps give you.. I no one has that market sewn up like apple has with the iPhone. On the basis that I was already looking at getting an iPod having the two in one seemed like a logical choice to me but i wanted to be sure and spent many months reading and playing in store. At first I dismissed due to the cost and was looking at the HTC HD2 that was until another friend showed me his. Its kinda like a cross between a phone and an iPad its huge! so back to the iPhone I had already decided that it was what i was looking for but all iPhones in Apple stores are over a WiFi connection the key thing is how it performs over the 3g network so the plunge taken one iPhone hooked up to Orange so hows it perform.

Well first off over WiFi its the first WiFi phone I have had (and I'v had a few) that actually feels like im getting the full speed and not only on browsing! every app that used the web was painless.

Now my worry was over 3g. Yes it is visually slower but so far not as it was on my old samsung unusable it was in all honesty fine and completly usable browsing is a joy on both wifi and 3g the interface works perfectly viewing all pages as they should be and the easy pinch zoom makes viewing on such a small screen very usfull you can zoom out to view all and zoom in when you want to read images may take a little longer over 3g but they all load and you get the entire page as its meant to be. often on my older phone all i got was the message some of the page failed to load and this was usually on a blank screen... some of the page??? All text is easy to read and you can flip the phone round to view it in widescreen.

Another of my old complaints with the old phone was email. i never managed to get it to work correctly.. I had my gmail account working inside of 2 minits. which as i said is what I wanted.. for it just to work and it did :)

I have not yet explored that many apps so far (their are so many!) but having played with a couple of twitter apps which again work really well I started with Tweetie and then changed over to tweetdeck simply because tweetdeck also allows you to use twitpic.. It also alows geotagging although i have not yet tested that.

So the touch screen? well again lets talk about the old phone and what put me off. Contact lists! they get pretty long and I hated searching for contacts it should be simple pull the list up or down well it only ever moved one or two at a time it was painfull... on the iPhone? drag it up release and of it flys so fluid! touch again to stop no effort required love it!

The other complaint I had with the touch screen was texting on the keyboard I have avoided texting for the last 18 months so much so I think I have sent more texts on the iPhone since I got it! yes you make errors every now and then but its so few and far between you don't really notice.

Im not going to talk the iPod function most of us know how well apple have that one already. And im not going to complain about the very low 3.2mp camera because i have taken that option before going with a decent camera and I just dont use it enough If im gonna need a camera I take one that is designed for job.

I will come back and add to this at a later date when I have had more time with it but so far very happy! I also be adding a blog post at some point soon about the available apps that as camper you might find usefull.