1 Phone.

The iPhone. There are some things it doesn't do. (Allow you to send things by Bluetooth.) There are a lot of limitations on how you can use it. (At least legally.) There are some things it doesn't have which should be common by now. (GPS.) It's exposed Apple as not-such-nice-guys-after-all in their rigid control over who in which countries are allowed to have one and when.

But none of that matters a jot. Not the lack of bluetooth, not the obviously missing applications that are sure to be included in the next version thereby making you spend more money, not the uptight controls on country and carrier usage. All that is forgiven. Because the thing is just so damn sexy, isn't it? It's just such a desirable THING. The typography. The touch-screen. The flicking between photos or pages with your thumb. The intuitive column resizing on web pages to maximise screen space. The look and feel of the thing. There's just no competition.

And that's what amazes me so much.

There's just no competition.

It's completely shocking that not one single other phone manufacturer - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Blackberry, Treo - has been able to come up with anything anywhere near this good.

The Nokia N95 has GPS built in, as well as being able to do pretty much whatever the iPhone can do. Great. So why does it look like it was made in 1995? (Maybe that's where the name comes from.)

Blackberry lets you pick up mail wherever you go. But have you seen the typography on the screen? After using the iPhone, a Blackberry feels about as up to date as an MS-DOS computer with the black screen and green flashing cursor.

The Sony Ericsson range (the w580 among them, which I had before I bought my iPhone), is flexible and lets you do pretty much whatever you want: shoot video, watch video, transfer songs... pretty much anything you can think of. So why does the design suddenly look downright embarrassing next to an iPhone?

It's 2007, for God's sake. The iPhone is of this era. And in reality, by now, it's the least we should be able to expect. But it's shocking that it's the only one. Every single offering from every other manufacturer looks as if it was designed in pre-millenium - at the latest. If I was a major shareholder of Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Blackberry, I would be asking serious questions about the designers employed by the companies.