Well, after about a month and a half with the iPhone, and the first real software update, and countless articles read, comments made, and people either asking for or just grabbing my iPhone just to play with it, I think I can make a considered judgement on this interesting little piece of technology.

I love it.

It hasn’t changed my life. But it’s made using the phone a pleasure, it’s changed some of my phone habits just slightly, and it’s made me think about how I use the devices around me to communicate. Before I had just a phone, and one I hated at that. Now I have something I like to use, and that I use in sometimes silly and sometimes smart ways. For instance I use text messaging a lot more than I used to.

I use the text messaging feature every day or two, where before I would have used it only if absolutely necessary, and then I would have used this text messaging widget on my computer instead of the phone keyboard. That’s because on my old phone, you had to navigate through several different screens even to get to the text feature, then it would have to activate, then you would have to use the regular phone keypad to attempt to type. It was absolutely hopeless for a feature that was supposed to save time. Now I can just touch the SMS icon. Then I see texts in the form of a conversation, a feature that really makes sense, and respond using a good if not perfect qwerty keyboard. It’s a pleasure to use.

But I’m not a different person. I still mostly dislike talking on the phone, even if the process is a lot easier. So I don’t really make more phone calls than I would have before. But the phone calls I do make, or answer, are much less painful, so I’m less likely to put them off. Just yesterday I was getting Thai food, soething I don’t normally do, but I was able to use the Google Maps feature to look up Thai places nearby, look at their Web pages, and call pretty easily. This would have been a painful process before (and I probably would have tried to get my girlfriend to do it for me).

Still, I notice I’m not really making more phone calls, just that I hate them less.

I love the email and Web functionality, though mostly as a toy, since I am so close to a computer for the majority of my day. It’s just fun to use the phone instead, and really useful at those rare times I’m away from my computer and really need to find something out or get in touch with somebody.

Four months ago the calendar would have been useless, but since I am 9-to-5 again it’s essential. Sometimes I have back to back meetings and the calendar lets me know where I need to be next rather than having to head back to my computer. So again, I still hate a lot of meetings, but this eliminates some of the annoying little side aspects of going to them.

Finally, the iPod stuff is really cool. I can’t do much more than I could do with my old nano, but it’s so much more fun with the iPhone interface.

Long story short: it doesn’t let me do stuff I couldn’t do before, but it makes a lot of tasks easier and a lot more fun.