On Tuesday, I got to play with the iPhone. Thanks to Paddy from Bak2u!

My impression of the iPhone has been a rollercoaster.

• The initial hype had me completely excited.
• After some thought, I realized that it was not really that great, technologically.
• The pre-Release hype and the videos that Apple release got me excited again!
• The post release reviews of the iPhone, and especially the keypad, made me dislike it.

Finally when I saw it on Tuesday, I was completely excited. It was smaller and thinner than I expected. And most importantly, it worked just fine! I tried surfing CNN, ping.sg and my own blog. I even left a comment on my own blog! Hahahaah!

All the sites looked really sweet. The text was crisp clear and navigating was a breeze. Though, long pages tended to be annoying to scroll through. The map feature seems really promising and the keyboard did not give any problems.

I was not too impressed by the cover flow and the photo gallery, where you can do your mondo-cool finger acrobatics to show it off.

I was unable to testing calling and sms, though, I cant see how iPhone can do either of these things better or worse than any other phones out there.

Then my colleague asked me today, if I had converted after finally touching the iPhone. Well, NO. Finally, I still feel that, from a utilitarian perspective, I see no use for most of the things it can do. On the other hand, all these effects and cool graphics are actually killing my battery. The price is also a killer. It’s just too expensive for something that really is a Jack of All the trades. Even as a “Wide Screen iPod” it has not enough memory for my purpose.

So all in all, iPhone still not my type of gadget.