So what's the iPhone 3G really like in action?

What are iPhone users' impressions of the device after a bit of use?

As I said in the last post, I don't have an iPhone myself, so this particular Apple experience is kinda passing me by. But I asked people with iPhone 3Gs what they think of them a few weeks on. I asked them for the good and the bad.

APG works in PR and she's proficient on Macs and PCs, using a PC at work. She says:

"The iPhone has been very good. The apps I have so far are just the free ones - the iPint beer, Facebook application and the Light Sabre, all of which are quite cool. I also downloaded a flashlight app which was useless. I've tried using Google Maps and GPS and they work really well - it was pretty accurate apart from when I tried searching for my boyfriend's parent's place. They live in a rural area and it didn't quite pin-point the house; more like the road in front of it.

"What I like about the iPhone is that the email function works well - I have my Gmail and my work email set up on Microsoft Exchange, and that works seamlessly. I also like how my Calendar is synced to my work one.

"Using WiFi on the iPhone 3G is great and particularly useful for using the YouTube application. I have already used 50MB on my 250MB data plan with 3G, and I am not too sure where it went! Using [the web browser] Safari is great - I can view most of the websites I visit.

"What I don't like is that I can't view Flash, such as when I want to watch a news piece on TV3's website.

"My iPhone has also frozen up once for about two minutes, and that scared me a bit. I was having problems with making sure my iPhone didn't sync my emails every 15 minutes but managed to fix that in the end. And I was quite surprised to find out that I can't use my songs in my iPod library as ring-tones - it seems to be a common function with other mobiles.

"Other than that, it's fantastic. I was waiting for a client who was running late at a café, but the café had WiFi - I was quite happy to be able to check my work emails and websites while I waited.

HC is a real Apple fan, but happens to work in tech retail with, mostly, PCs:

"I still love my iPhone as much as when I bought it. In fact, I love it more after owning it for a few weeks. When I first opened my iPhone and turned it on, I was amazed at how cool it was, but after a few weeks of surfing the App Store, I cannot get over how versatile and amazing this device really is.

"The App Store is filled with awesome apps available for free or at a cost. In total today I have downloaded 27 apps, my favourites being Crash Kart Racing and AIM. I have also bought Enigmo, Band, Super Monkey Ball and Vector Pong. Some of the free apps are real gems such as Remote. Remote works seamlessly with iTunes or an Apple TV.

"The best feature I found was the ability to use your iPhone as a wireless keyboard for the Apple TV. Should you navigate to a search field on the Apple TV, a keyboard appears on the iPhone and allows you to type much faster than selecting each letter on the TV. Remote, among other things, is what makes the iPhone so powerful and adaptable.

"Not all apps on the store are worth it. I have stumbled across a few apps that were either pointless, hard to use or very buggy. To name one, No.2 is a great idea but just not practical to use. It is a virtual pencil made for quick drawings, but I found it too hard to use when wanting to draw something quickly.

"A few of the free apps seem for the sake of it, not really practical. But in saying that, there are a lot on there that are just too cool.

"MobileMe works very well with my iPhone. I love having email instantly pushed to me and my contacts and calendars synchronised with my Mac. The iPhone feels like a portable version of my Mac. If fact, I think I could get by if I had to be without my personal Mac for a while - the iPhone has everything I need.

"For those who haven't seen SMS on the iPhone, it is amazing. It feels like I am chatting in iChat [Apple's Skype-like - it predates Skype - audiovisual chat software], which I have found means I txt more than I ever used to. I chewed through my 600 txts included in the plan within the first week; I'm currently up to around 1700 txts. So for those who txt a lot, watch out! iPhone is even more addictive for txting than on other phones.

"I have found one little bug in the SMS application. I'm not sure if it is just my iPhone or something in the iPhone OS, but occasionally my iPhone will stop making the txt alert sound and just vibrate instead. I have to reboot to fix the problem. This bugs me, but it's not major.

"I chose the $80 a month plan with Vodafone, and so far have found it to be ample for my needs, apart from the txting. So far I have only used 15MBs of cellular data and still have 43 minutes air time remaining out of the 150 allocated. Obviously this opinion will change depending on how much you use your iPhone, but the plans are actually more generous than one may first think.

"I found that $80 is worth it to me. The only thing lacking support on Vodafone is visual voice mail. This hasn't bothered me, as if you tap the voicemail button the iPhone dials Vodafone's voice mail.

"To summarise, after owning the iPhone for a few weeks, I have found the device to be even more amazing than I had expected. The App Store is so valuable to the iPhone, I think it will play a huge part in the success of the new model. The plans, once you get over the initial bite, are generous and the iPhone works well on the Vodafone Network."