Ok, I'm biased, I admit. I love Apple's products. They are designed for perfection. They are designed with style. They are thought-through. They are crafted with passion. So when Steve showed off the new iPhone in January 2007, I already knew I would like that little thing as much as I like my other Apple gadgets. I watched the commercials, read what there was to read, and it looked and sounded like an absolutely great device - a little revolution.

But this is just nothing compared to actually having it in your hands, seeing and feeling it... using it! Just a few weeks after the iPhone hit the stores in the U.S., I happened to be in New York -- and sure enough I had to go see the new Apple store on 5th Ave. ... and the new iPhone, of course. And I was blown away: it is so much better than any commercial can tell!

Alone this bright and sharp high resolution screen... no depth at all: the pixels are shining right on the surface! Perfectly viewable even from extreme angles. I've never seen something like this on a mobile device. And the extremely fluid animations - this user interface is just something unseen on anything smaller than a PC! Here it really pays having a pretty much full-fledged OS X in this little cutie. That is: a full Unix operating system, with all the niceties of Apple's outstanding GUI! This alone sets the iPhone apart from any other phone! Yes, there are "clones" from other companies trying to follow the footsteps... LG being a prominent example. But these are just no comparison in beauty and consistency throughout the user experience. And they will never be! Why? Because they are lacking a powerful foundation. They are lacking a rich and mature operating system. OS X brings all the UI elements and nice animation for free -- zero coding effort. Hand-code all that stuff on Symbian? WinCE? PalmOS? Forget it.

So it's end of 2007. The iPhone is finally coming to Europe. A long wait... almost a year since the keynote, and half a year after the first shipping phone in the U.S. And I did wait -- yes, there had been ways to crack and jailbreak the iPhone before, and I did think about it... but ultimately the iPhone is only fun with the "right" rate plans. I'm lucky that my 2 year contract with Vodafone anyway terminates end of 2007. So with a heavy heart I'm turning my back on Vodafone (I was very happy with them and always favored them over others) and moving on to T-Mobile, Apple's German exclusive partner. And every day I'm taking my iPhone into my hands, I know it's worth it: the iPhone is just so amazing, the ultimate "one-piece-companion". It's my phone, my iPod, my video player, my PDA, and my mobile Internet in one device!

Oh yes, and there are some other iPods, too. There is my "black beauty", a 160GB iPod classic that holds all my music and still has ample space for TV-shows and movies. And there is my 4th generation 60GB iPod photo, which I still keep for ripping photos from my digital cameras when I'm on trips without a notebook (come on Apple, make that camera connector work on the iPod classic as well!!). And finally there is my very first generation 10GB iPod from 2001! Kind of nostalgia, already... :-)