iPhone - A user's analysis.

I am an ardent Windows user. It's everything from entertainment to my bread and butter. So buying a MAC based product wasn't just a cake walk. I've always disliked MAC; OS X to be precise (sorry MAC fans). But still I couldn't resist myself from getting an iPhone. Getting to the point, I've owned an iPhone for about 6 months now. It is admittedly the most sophisticated piece of technology out there. Everything from the touch interface to the proximity sensor to the accelerometer seems to be seamlessly integrated to fulfill a smart phone users every tech - fantasy. The numbers speak for themselves, iPhone's smart phone market share rose to 28% in USA in less than a year from it's release. But I guess we all know that. So how is it like owning one?From the hardware perspective it's a really designed to be smart. Good battery life, with ample built-in power saving features. As I already mentioned hardware wise it is really sophisticated. The headphone jack, although is a standard AUX port, but the slot itself is designed so that the commercial AUX cables do not fit in. You have to buy iPhone compatible cables from Apple store or a third party vendor. It's nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy by Apple. The best workaround, use the dock. The only improvement I can think of is to provide a replaceable battery compartment. Having a detachable battery not only helps people on the road, but also helps to reset the phone. People claim that having a 3G radio would help, but only if you're a European.From the software perspective it has some great features. The in-built safari browser gives you the best browsing experience (at least on a phone). Having an iPod in the phone with an access to the iTunes store is a plus. The weather channel and mail applications come in handy. Although it currently supports only pop mail, it's still useful. Other than that, the software itself is not too impressive. The initial releases including the most latest ones are good but not fully featured. By that I mean the iPhone can do much better. Over the past 6 months, Apple has been releasing a new software upgrade almost every month. Apart from adding minor features like home screen shuffling, multiple home screens, web shortcuts on home screens etc, they really didn't do much. From the very beginning, what I really want to see on an iPhone is the ability to support corporate emails and have applications, games etc. We certainly know that the jail broken one's have applications. Besides they boast about having a complete OS X kernel running in the background, then why not use it's full power? Correct. Until now it felt like Apple's deaf to these user demands. But turns out not quite. In the backgrounds, Apple's been working on it's most feature rich software update; version 2.0. Recently in 6th March 2008, Apple announced that it will release the 2.0 update sometime in June. Maybe to mark it's one year anniversary. At the same time Apple also released a SDK for developer's to create applications for the iPhone. It also promises better (or rather a functional) Microsoft Exchange support via ActiveSync, remote wipe, WPA 2.x support, Cisco IPSec VPN and much more. Mind blowing isn't it. I tried to get my hands on a beta of this 2.0 (without jail breaking that is), but in vain. Also I also wanted to play around with the SDK, but it turns out it works on only good for nothing MAC books (once again, sorry MAC fans). Only if they could release a SDK for Windows!!! For now, I'm just counting down till they release this upgrade and hope that they do not delay the release, coz my sources tell me the beta is buggy as hell (at least the email part). And hope they decide to release a SDK for Windows (maybe I'm dreaming...). That way I can make some money developing app's or maybe get a slice of that 100 million dollars iFund pie.In conclusion, all those of you still "thinking" of getting an iPhone; well you know what to do...