I had no idea how truly useful having the "real" web on the go could be. Sure, I had the "mobile web" on my previous phone, but it was wretched. Opera Mini helped make it a little more tolerable but the experience was still wretched. Enter the iPhone, and it's about as good an experience as you can get in such a small form factor with today's technology. Since applying the 1.0.1 update, Safari rarely crashes and my push email works wonderfuly. I'll digress for a moment to say that yes, I understand everything should be rock solid, including Safari. But come on, it's a first-generation product from a company that has never done a phone before. Apple did remarkably well. The browser on my previous phone crashed a time or two also, but the difference is that it never once got updated. iPhone 1.0.1 was out within six weeks. I called Cingular support a few times about various problems with the previous phone. They pointed the finger at LG. After an exhaustive search to find LG's phone number, I called them and they pointed the finger back at Cingular. Come on guys, someone has to take responsibility here. It makes sense to me for it to be LG's responsibility to support the device they designed and manufactured. Besides, Cingular sells several different manufacturer's phones -- it doesn't seem reasonable to expect them to be able to support every model from every manufacturer. Warranty exchanges, yes. Tech support for all but the simplest problems, no.

So I was in Denver and didn't know my way around. I didn't know where the restaurants were, how the streets were laid out, or how to get around. No problem! I could easily use Google, Citysearch, or the Denver convention and visitor's bureau website to find the names (and often addresses) of places I wanted to go, and Google Maps to find out how to get there. I could send snapshots to family and friends via email so they could see the pictures at a larger size (and I could send them to people who don't have multimedia messaging packages -- yes, there are still such people out there). In short, iPhone blows the socks off other phones when it comes to web and email capability. The Blackberry does email extremely reliably, but its email capability is not nearly as flexible in non-corporate environments as the iPhone's. How many photographers work in a corporate environment? I'm not talking about having corporate clients, I'm talking about having a big corporation as your direct employer. There are some, but I would guess not many.