With the tagline “Twice as fast. Half the price” the new iPhone 3G from Apple is fast becoming The Gadget to Flaunt. Even before its 3G upgrade, it was named Invention of the Year in 2007 by Time magazine. It is a magic box with a thousand applications in just its ‘App Store’ alone! Of course it is not just a phone:  It is an ipod, you can serve the net with it, navigate with Assisted GPS- all at 3G speed that is already built in!

It has a multi-touch screen that can understand complex gestures: Place two fingers on the screen and spread them apart to zoom out! Flick your finger across the screen to “spin” the menu list. Flip the phone sideways and the image on the screen automatically adjusts! Bring it to your ears and the display shuts off to save battery power! Keyboard and buttons are all virtual. And plenty other visual effects…

Designed with a minimum amount of hardware, yet you can still snap pictures and have visual voicemail but, sorry, no video recording…

No matter what device you use - be it a Mac at home, a pc at work - your email, contacts, calendar, photos, files, etc all stay the same wherever you check them with “Mobile Me”, a feature that works on Microsoft Outlook and Mac because changes made on these desktop applications are synced. Most of the popular email systems like Yahoo!, gmail, and AOL are supported. And like your pc, you can view Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF and other attachments… and even stream YouTube! (7 hours of this with a built-in rechargeable, non-removable battery; 300 hours standby)

In most countries it must be activated in the store.  However, in some countries as in the UK, online purchases allow for activation via iTunes. The Operating System only runs software signed by Apple. However some have breached this by ‘jailbreaking’ and replacing with a preferred OS.