OK, so I said I wasn’t going to buy an iPhone yet. Yesterday I changed my mind and went to visit the O2 shop in Fareham, where the (very attractive) sales assistants were busy demonstrating the iPhone to the (very short) queue of people at the door.

Worse—for my wallet, that is—my existing phone is pay-as-you-go and I’d only recently topped it up with credit. Why not a contract phone, you ask? Well, quite simply, I’m not part of the current mobile-obsessed culture here in the U.K. and I never really have been. So how do I justify the cost of an iPhone contract? Good question. I’ll have to think on that :-)

Anyway, because of the substantial amount of credit on my old phone, I haven’t ported the number. So if you have my number, you’ll need to update it. Sorry about that.

A few observations about my new iPhone:

• Mobile Safari has already crashed a few times on me.
• Mail doesn’t support S/MIME. That’s annoying, because I use S/MIME quite extensively.
• Mail doesn’t seem to support threading, which is a shame. Maybe I’m just missing the setting?
• Mobile Safari doesn’t do SVG yet.
• EDGE is just fine, speed-wise. OK, it isn’t as fast as my home broadband connection, but it’s perfectly usable even for web browsing. I was using it today, as a matter of fact.
• The Google Maps application really is as good as you’d hope. OK, no GPS, but since you can only really use GPS if you have line-of-sight to sufficient satellites, putting GPS in a phone is of questionable utility anyway. I think people forget that in-car satellite navigation systems contain rather more than just a GPS receiver.
• The camera is perfectly adequate. If I want high quality photos, I’ll use my SLR thank-you very much.
• iTunes doesn’t seem to have any ringtones options here in the U.K. right now. I don’t actually want a silly ringtone, so this isn’t a huge deficiency, though I do have a couple of bits of music that would make good non-silly ringtones. And doubtless when we do get ringtone support, we’ll have to put up with the indefensibly silly “a ringtone is something different from playing a section of your music” nonsense here too.

Anyway, it’s very nice and it’s a huge improvement over previous phones I’ve owned.