I thought I’d share some of my early impressions of the iPhone after using it for just over 48 hours now. So far, I think it’s great. It’s a just a beautiful device and it does what it does very, very well. Here are some thoughts (in no particular order):

• The iPhone touch screen is very responsive and judicious about what stimuli to process at the same time. Multitouch is very cool and works as advertised.
• I’m a little surprised at the lack of multiple SMS recipients. I’d like to have the ability to send text messages to multiple folks at once, without first setting up a group in Address Book on the Mac first. This needs to be fixed. From a UI perspective, I could imagine that another blue plus sign in the recipient area would do the trick.
• I love how the media audio volume fades down when a call comes in, then fades right back up at the appropriate place and level when the call is completed.
• The call interface is great. I really enjoy creating ad hoc conference calls, placing folks on hold. I think the speakerphone volume is great, and I’ve been told that my voice quality at the other end of the line is quite good.
• Visual Voicemail rocks. After I used it for the first time, I never want to go back to the old way again.
• The touchscreen keyboard is working fine for me. From time to time, it’ll suggest some pretty strange words (a lot of the time actually), but I sense that it’s adding the major keywords that I type a lot to its library. I’m not good at it with two thumbs yet (I’d say 70% accuracy for now). I can fly with one finger though and that’s something I really couldn’t do with my Treo. With the Treo, I felt like I had to use two thumbs. With the iPhone, one finger seems kind of preferable to me right now.
• The email application is top notch. I was able to get both my Yahoo! mail and my .Mac mail up and running in seconds. I am disappointed with the lack of support for reporting junk mail or spam. Not much spam gets through my Yahoo! Mail account, but enough does for it to be annoying. I’d like a “report” button of some kind that would delete the message and report it as spam at the same time.
• It really is the best iPod I’ve owned. Coverflow is impressive and the liberal use of album art in the UI and on the display just looks stunning.
• Since there are more UI contextual options available, I do wish there was one picky and pesky feature available. I’d like to be able to mark podcasts as “new.” If you listen to a podcast for a second, it gets marked as “not new” on the iPhone (and on regular iPods). Well, on the next sync, iTunes will remove that podcast (if you’re only syncing new podcasts–which I do to conserve space). Well, that means I have to mark it as “not new” in iTunes and re-sync to put it back on the iPhone. When I listen to it, I have to find where I left off…which can be tedious on long podcasts. It’s very much a corner-case, I know…but it would at least make my podcast listening life much easier.
• AT&T’s EDGE network is slow. It’s not as slow though as folks made it out to seem. Remember, I was used to using a tired old Treo 650 with the Blazer (ugh) browser–so I’m used to a crappy mobile web experience. Even on EDGE, I’ve been able to do some web tasks that I would have NEVER attempted on my Treo (like shopping online and paying bills). Plus, Safari on the iPhone is a dream, and Multitouch really makes the pages come to life. How about some support for Flash, though?
• The camera app seems rushed to me. I like the photo quality (much, much better than the crappy 640 x 480 on my Treo), and I like being able to just email the photos out to Flickr or other people in my contacts, without having to use SMS. I would love to be able to capture and share video though. Why no camcorder app?