After 18 months of anticipation, JOHN HARRIS has finally got his hands on an iPhone: Despite the occasional problem with heavy breathing underwater, Apple’s 3G handset has lived up to the hype.

  When at last I got to review an iPhone, my expectations were high.

I wanted a simple to use phone with an easy to read screen, straightforward email integration and affordable operation. Despite a few glitches outlined below, Apple’s iPhone 3G delivered on all counts.

The best part of the iPhone is its touchscreen. Unlocking it required just a left-to-right swipe of my finger. Its Home screen contains a bunch of applications, including Phone, Mail, web browser and iPod, which are accessible with a finger press.

Once chosen, each application displays customised commands, controlled with a touch of the screen.

The only button the front of the iPhone returned me to the Home screen.

The phone’s Safari browser called up web pages quickly, either over a 3G mobile network or an accessible wireless network. If the web page was too small to read, I turned the iPhone on its side and the screen automatically rotated to landscape view.

I could also enlarge the on-screen image by drawing apart my fingers on the touchscreen.

Customising the iPhone was a cinch. It took me less than two minutes to synchronise the iPhone with Microsoft Exchange at my office. Every email that arrived at work was immediately “pushed” to the phone, keeping me constantly in touch. Likewise, when I entered a meeting on the iPhone calendar, it passed those details back to my calendar at work.

To exercise the iPhone’s Contact application, I downloaded more than 6000 contacts from the office. It took a couple of minutes.

While this volume made the Favourites menu a bit sluggish, the iPhone’s touch controls offered three ways to navigate this hand-held directory.

I could search for a name with an on-screen keyboard. A vertical alphabet on the right side of the screen allowed me to pinpoint the first letter of the name I was seeking. Flicking my finger down allowed me to scroll through names quickly and easily.

Despite my large fingers and poor hand-eye coordination, entering text with the on-screen keyboard was a doddle once I was used to it. As I touched a key, the selected letter or character was enlarged to confirm my selection, easily identifying data entry errors.

The iPhone’s simplicity extended my PC to my pocket in a way that I’ve never experienced before.

I’m speaking literally because the phone fitted in my shirt pocket without stressing the seams, something that hasn’t happened since I had a tiny Nokia six or eight years ago.

The iPhone is packed with great functions including multi-city clock and weather forecast applications, which were very useful for a US trip I’m planning.

I also appreciated its GPS function. While not a fully-fledged voice guidance system, like the CoPilot software in an HTC TYTN II phone, the iPhone global positioning system uses Google Maps to provide a current location and offer routes to a destination.

Another great feature is the iPhone’s App Store, for finding and downloading programs to further enhance the phone. Examples include Facebook for iPhone, Brain Challenge, Google Mobile Apps and Frommers New York. Prices ranged from $12.99 to free.

But, despite its many joys, the iPhone is not perfect. Sadly, its biggest disappointment was the phone itself. Although calls were mostly crisp and clear, occasionally I’d make a call where the connection was unintelligible: To both me and the recipient, any conversation sounded like someone heavy-breathing underwater.

Rebooting the phone generally resolved the problem: However if I’d bought a handset, I would definitely lodge a warranty claim with Apple.

Although I’ve heard criticism of the iPhone’s battery life, I found it no worse than the Palm Treo 680 I’ve used for the past year or so.

That said, the 3G phone does draw a fair bit of power, so I charged it at least once a day to ensure it had enough juice to work its magic.

One nark is that it lacks a user-changeable battery, so, unlike my Treo, I can’t carry a fully charged spare in case it runs out of power on the road.

The iPhone is convenient to recharge. Not only does it slurp juice from a computer’s USB port, but the power adaptor has a USB port in the back, making its cable a dual USB/power supply line.

Under Settings, the iPhone even displays the amount of time since the unit was last charged.

Which brings me to the crux of the matter: What does it cost to run?

I gave it a fair crack of the whip during my 16 day review, making 182 minutes of phone calls, downloading 189 megabytes of cellular data and pushing 22.6 megabytes the other way.

Assuming that reflects about half my monthly usage, I’d need to buy a $99 Cap Contract from Vodafone, which includes $600 of talk and text messages and 500MB of data per month.

Under that plan, the 8GB iPhone costs $4.13 per month and the 16GB iPhone costs $9.13 per month.

Optus has a bewildering array of business and consumer plans, but, as an example, a $59 Cap plan would give me $350 worth of calls and a 500MB data allowance. Over two years on that plan, the 8GB iPhone would cost $2 per month and its 16GB sibling $7 each month.

Just to demonstrate that you need to pay attention to these details, if I chose a Telstra plan with its $5 data pack, I’d risk paying nearly $500 in extra charges (based on its excess data cost rate of $1 per megabyte).

Despite its occasional submarine calls, the iPhone 3G has definitely lived up to its hype. I am officially a convert and plan to put my money where my mouth is this week.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. He was provided with a loan iPhone for the two-week review by national carrier Vodafone.

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