I'd pretty much resolved to not buy an iPhone at release as I was going to wait for my carrier, Three, to make their iPhone announcement. However, the scarcity of review units for media, the fact that I had a couple of iPhone stories to write and my own technolust had me making the switch to an iPhone and new carrier late last week.

After five days of iPhone use I can say that the iPhone is the best smartphone I've used but it does have some shortcomings.

Let's start with basic telephony. Sound quality through both the handsfree speakerphone and regular handset functions are very good. Calling people back from the address book, call log and missed call list is easy.

Web browsing with Safari is pretty good but despite Apple's best efforts, browsing on a 3.5" screen is a compromise. No matter what user interface magic Apple can weave with the use of zoom and scrolling, you can't get away from the size of the screen. That said, Safari on the iPhone is the best mobile browsing experience that I've come across.

The email client is very good. My main criticism isn't with the client but with Apple's MobileMe service. To say it's been unreliable would be an insult to stuff that's unreliable. There have been long outage periods and it's very hard to have anything positive to say at the moment as I have low trust of the service. When it works it's very good with calendar, address book and email syncing between systems. I've even had my calendar syncing between an Eee PC running Office 2007, an iMac, a MacBook Pro and the iPhone work - when MobileMe is up.

Battery life is the chink in the iPhone's armour. With 3G active and WiFi and Bluetooth off I need to charge the unit every night. Considering what the iPhone's doing, that in keeping with many 3G phones but not good enough for a true road warrior's main comms device. I'd not be surprised to see after-market mods come to market that install a high-capacity, warranty-voiding battery.

There has been some criticism of the iPhone's GPS functions. Personally, I don't mind it. Satellite acquisition and positional determination is very fast. Hitting the Maps application, I reckon I've had a fix on my position in a few seconds and the maps, from Google Maps via 3G, are there a few seconds later. There are no spoken directions but I'd expect that need to be filled by software through the App Store.

So my overall score? I'd give it an 7.5/10 with marks lost for battery life and the lack of spoken directions with the GPS.