The SynthaSite Cape Town office recently surprised its staff with iPhones. We're predominantly an office of people who work weird hours and work from home or wherever we happen to be frequently, so there probably is some sort of justification possible if one were looking for one.
I'm not all that much of a gadget person. I've never owned an iPod (although I've borrowed one for international plane flights), a PDA, or any other sort of portable electronic device. Well, except my Nintendo DS and DS Lite, which is part of my gaming addiction. I've never been one to use a cellphone for anything beyond making phone calls and sending a few messages. As such, I had no real expectations going in.
The iPhone is just plain intuitive — things are were I expect them to be and work the way I expect them to. Perhaps having used OS X for the past year has helped, but I think it should be relatively universal. Convincing iTunes that I didn't want to register it was about the hardest part of the start-up process. Using iTunes already probably helped, but my MacBookPro life synced over to the iPhone readily enough (had to prune my 10+ GB of podcasts a bit to fit, admittedly). The default mail application works fairly decently for my Google Apps For Your Domain mail — archiving in GMail terms means moving the mail from the Inbox to the All Mail folder.
Would have liked to see my MacBookPro's wireless networks transferred to the iPhone. Wish there was something that could handle my Google Apps For Your Domain calendar by default. The contact import from my Google contacts created hundreds more entries than I expected it to — most imports from Google contacts don't import every person who has ever sent me email. Can't make ringtones from my existing music, or just use any old MP3 as a ringtone. The built-in Maps application is pretty useless, since Google Maps are pretty useless in South Africa, and no sane option seems to exist to use the decent OpenStreetMap coverage that exists in at least Cape Town. The GPS also seems to take its time to figure out where I am.
The biggest irritation, however, is the iTunes Store/App Store. The South African store is crippled. Besides the relatively understandable (ie, not entirely in their control) total lack of music, TV series, and movies, it also lacks podcasts, games, and some fundamental applications. A few "must-have" applications my iPhone or iPod Touch-wielding friends use elsewhere don't appear. For example, the Google Mobile App. I can't see Google being behind not having the Google Mobile App available to South African users. So, it seems Apple is being weird.
Still early days, but I'm pretty positive about the whole thing. I'm especially enjoying having a portable mail reader and web browser from my couch at home, so I don't enter that "at a computer" mode in front of my MacBookPro. Time will tell if Apple's restrictive application environment will increasingly get to me, or if I'll find a killer app that will make the iPhone invaluable.