The iPhone is a selling powerhouse. Within its first weekend of being on the market, the iPhone sold a whopping one million units. Now, a few months shy of its year anniversary, everyone has a friend or family member, or at least knows of someone else, that has an iPhone 3G. If Apple was intending world domination with the release of the iPhone, I think it’s safe to say that they are not far from their goal. Despite this, how does the iPhone really fare in terms of usage and functionality? I have had five months to play around with my own iPhone 3G and I’ll say this: it is amazing and I don’t know how I ever lived without it! With that being said, the iPhone 3G is not perfect and there is always room for improvement.

The iPhone 3G is your all-in-one, do-everything device. It plays music, it plays movies, it allows you to view and take pictures, it does internet and email, it has tons of downloadable games and applications that do everything from converting units to tracking your diet plan, and, of course, it’s a phone with visual voicemail. What I love most about the phone is its internet browsing and email capabilities. The Push technology incorporated into the phone that allows me to retrieve my emails automatically while I am on the go is absolutely wonderful. With the internet, being able to do a google search of concepts I don’t understand (and many other inane things) anywhere I am has completely revolutionized my way of life. Yet, not being able to compose and view emails in landscape view, and being locked out of some of the internet due to the iPhone’s inability to handle Flash, is somewhat of a pain (though it must be said that the iPhone’s Safari web browser is still far superior to the web browsers found on other smart phones). Also, it is frustrating when connecting to the UH Wifi without having an autofill function for my username and password.

Aside from the minor internet issues listed above, there are a few more things that keep the iPhone from being an immaculate phone. One major complaint about the iPhone is its lack of media text messaging support. People love text messaging, including picture text messages, so it really is a wonder why Apple did not include this service with the iPhone. Along the lines of text messaging, there is no copy and paste function for your texts, a function found on several other smart phones. For me, these are all of the problems I have with my iPhone (there is also the minor issue of not having a video recorder, but I am not all that interested in recording movies onto my phone).

Luckily, most of the problems I have listed above is going to be fixed with the iPhone 3.0 software! The software upgrade will be free for iPhone 3G owners and about $10 for those with iPod Touches. The upgrade will enable landscape email and text messaging, photo text messaging, autofill for internet browsing, an amazing Spotlight search function that can be used to search the entire phone and even in applications, and many more little additions. The iPhone will still not be able to handle Flash, but that is expected considering that Flash animation does hog resources. The iPhone 3.0 software will be available for download this summer.