It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge.

The best thing about the way this handles e-mail is that the message content shows up vividly. It nicely manages JPEGs, HTML and PDFs. (The iPhone can also open Word and Excel attachments, though you can’t edit them.) I had some problems with one of my accounts—sometimes the mail was blocked, other times it wouldn’t send outgoing mail. Apple looked into it and told me that it has something to do with my ISP blocking Port 25. Their engineers suggested a fix and said that this was something that would probably be addressed in an update. Still, this is an explanation someone paying $500 for an e-mail device shouldn’t have to hear.

Workout lovers will want to keep their Nanos and Shuffles for the gym. And heavy music users accustomed to 30 or 80 gigabytes of storage will be unhappy at the limited capacity of the iPhone. (Of the 8 gigs on my iPhone, I now have 669 songs, one three-hour movie, three half-hour television episodes, 361 photos, and a bit of “other,” meaning e-mail and contacts. It’s almost full.) [You can't use the iTunes store on the phone.]

The 2-megapixel camera works decently (though I sometimes hit the shutter unintentionally). It’s easy to send a picture, make it your wallpaper or assign it to a contact.

What about flaws? First is the difficulty of using a virtual keyboard that pops up on the screen when it’s time to enter text. So far, I’m nowhere close. It took me a couple of days to get used to hitting the right keys using a single finger. If you are considering a phone primarily to monitor and reply to mail, you may stick to your Blackberry.

One day I purposely ran the battery down; the iPhone winked out after 14 hours, including six hours of talking, Web-browsing, music-listening and the viewing of an episode of “Weeds.”

One more intractable problem is Apple’s decision to use the slower EDGE data network, as opposed to a faster 3G net. The EDGE network actually has two speeds, and when you’re on the slower one, Web pages load up with what feels like dial-up speed.

Bottom line: ven those who never buy one will benefit from its advances, as competitors have already taken Apple’s achievements as a wake-up call to improve their own products. But for all its virtues, the iPhone is still a risky venture because it’s yet to be proven that, despite the wow factor, millions of people are ready to pay several hundred dollars more than the going rate for phones.

But in the future—when the iPhone has more applications and offers more performance, with a lower price—buyers will find even more value. So smart consumers may well wait for that day.