Well now that some of the hype has died down, I actually went to an Apple shop and had a good poke around at the Iphone the other day.

Now, I'm a bit of a phone geek. I've had a succession of "giant" smartphones with touchscreens, real web browsing, email, video, music etc since 2003, and maybe that explains it a bit. But at the end of the day, I was massively underwhelmed by the Iphone.

I'll admit that the UI is nice. Not as revolutionary as people have been suggesting, but nice - you press an on-screen button, something happens, etc etc - it's intuitive enough, but not noticeably more intuitive than any of the other touchscreen phones (based on Symbian UIQ or Windows Mobile) that I've used. I mean, touchscreens by their very nature are easy like that - you press things on screen and things happen, and as long as they're the things you expect to happen, then no problem. That's generally the way. The Iphone adds a couple of tricks like pinching to the party, but meh - it didn't change my life.

The UI on the Iphone worked fine, but it didn't wow me in any way. And to be honest, coming from a touchscreen sort of background, I was left puzzled by a few things. For instance, why do none of the icons in the status bar do anything? If I press the little wifi icon on my current phone (an HTC Tytn II), or click on the same icon on a PC or even Mac desktop, I get a dialogue telling me what I'm connected to, and how to change my settings. So why doesn't the supposedly easy-peasy Iphone do the same? Why, when I pressed the Iphone's on-screen wifi icon, did nothing happen at all? It seems odd to me that a UI that's been lauded as the greatest thing since point-and-click can ignore intuitive conventions like that, and end up burying things in menus that need be only a click away.

The other thing that struck me was the auto-rotation - while you're using the web brower, or the Ipod app, you can turn the phone on its side and it'll reorient the screen for you, in landscape mode. Slick, but what happpens when you press the button (the only button) to go back to the menu? The whole thing falls on its arse, because the menu, and anywhere else you go, is back in portrait. To me, that's really stupid, and not the magical experience that the hype machine has been suggesting.

The thing about any UI is, once you get used to how things work, you don't notice it anymore. That's the real problem with the Iphone, I think. All the icandy is great (and yes the Ipod application looks nice, the coverflow is impressive, the iris which opens and closes when you go in and out of camera mode is cute) but ultimately you'll stop noticing those things in time, and that's when you're left with what you can actually do with the phone. This is where it starts to come up really short. We've all seen the list of missing features: there's no video recording, no picture messaging (you can't send, and presumably you can't recieve either, so hard luck to your camera-toting friends), no free ringtones (you have to pay for them in Itunes, even for music you've paid for already), no bluetooth file transfer, etc etc. When the Iphone was launched, much fanfare was made of Googlemaps - but of course that's now available for virtually any phone, and some - unlike the Iphone - even have the GPS to make it useful. Worst of all, in this mobile-internet world, the Iphone has no 3G, let alone the broadband speed HSDPA being rolled out by the networks at the moment, so although the Safari browser is very nice, it's next to useless away from a wifi-hotspot.

This is a massively expensive phone - the unique and ugly marriage of high up-front price with high ongoing contract committment over 18 months is a real turn off, and for that I'd expect a phone that covers all the bases. It's supposedly a smartphone, and certainly priced as such, but yet basic smartphone tricks - like editing a Word or Excel document, for example - are completely beyond it. It'll open them as email attachments, but that's as far as it goes.

Then there's the whole input problem - I'm used to my touchscreen smartphones having a few choices in that area, with at the very least handwriting recognition, plus an onscreen keyboard, and generally a physical keypad and/or preferably a full Qwerty. That's not just me being greedy, it's practical - different methods suit different situations, whether you're walking along or sitting down for example. The Iphone caters for none of this, but has an on-screen self-correcting keyboard that tries to guess what you were trying to type even when you inevitably fail to hit the right non-tactile, on screen key. Despite what much of the hype says, there's nothing new about this keyboard, I've seen similar things on various devices, and none of them have performed any worse than this one did for me - which is to say, not very well at all. Typing any length of text will invariably produce something perfectly spelt, but incomprehensible, as the predictive correction system guesses every other word wrong. That would be fine if I could just whip out my stylus and correct it, but there is no stylus, and no handwriting recognition either. Apple know that you don't need these things, you see.

Without a decent keyboard/entry method, the email client on the Iphone is already pretty nobbled - but there are other problems with it too, like the lack of any Exchange or Blackberry support, so you can't have what Apple describe as the "best ever email" pushed to your phone.

Even for lowly SMS, the support is pretty poor - Apple have opted for an "innovative" threaded idea, where conversations get stuck together in little speech bubbles on the screen, which looks cute but then runs into problems. You can't do anything with individual messages - you can't forward them, and you can't delete them either - all you can do is delete the entire conversation between you and that person. Not so cute.

What it comes down to is this: the Apple Iphone is the most expensive smartphone you're likely to ever see. But it's not as smart as virtually any other smartphone on the market, and actually lacks useful features that you'd take for granted on even the cheapest, dumbest pay as you go phone. We're supposed to not notice that because it's so gee swell amazing, but you know what? It isn't that either.

Good Ipod, lousy phone/communications device - just by a Touch instead.