The 3G iPhone launch in Australia on 11 July 2008 is increasingly being recognised as something of a technology milestone for our nation - and waiting in the long line outside the 400 George Street T-Life store at 5.30am that day, it was fascinating to hear conversation bristling with questions about the cost of data packs, whether BigPond content – especially pay-per-use video - would be available and unmetered, whether visual voicemail would work and whether it was desirable to pay extra for the phone to be unblocked.

The answers to most of these questions were unique to Australia - not something which could be discovered by reading Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal or David Pogue in the New York Times.

Two weeks into my ownership of the iPhone, I have developed some working principles to get the most out of it:

1. Telstra wifi hotspots have free Internet access on a Telstra plan, so if you have wifi home networking, wifi at your office and mostly use your iPhone for casual browsing or iTunes use when at a Telstra public hotspot, then mobile data consumption can be sensibly managed.
2. There is no shame in iTunes syncing your favourite free podcasts before you hit the road - it is fast, reliable and definitely the least expensive way to enjoy an iPhone’s media capability. As a leap up from my scratched, ailing 5G video iPod, the iPhone has been a dramatic improvement. (Although consider what will happen when MP3 songs become available for purchase later this year – your proprietary DRM wrapped iTunes music may be somewhat less attractive…)
3. Don’t throw away your Blackberry. ActiveSync with Microsoft Exchange worked adequately (albeit slowly) for me, but authentication required NextG Internet access rather than wifi, therefore the iPhone’s wifi needed to be manually switched off to force the iPhone to use NextG and access mail/calendar/contacts via Active Sync (because the phone will use wifi access first if it is available)
4. I will still use my physical, full-size Bluetooth foldup keyboard with my Blackberry Curve when working at an aeroplane seat table - the traditional keyboard allows much more reliable and faster typing speeds than the iPhone’s virtual on-screen keys
5. Using ActiveSync to access corporate e-mail required a longer password which was unavoidable upon startup due to corporate security policies and cumbersome to routinely enter from the iPhone’s touch screen-based keypad.

If you have everything switched on (wifi, Bluetooth, multiple email accounts all frantically polling a pop server, etc) battery life can be as short as 4-5 hours, so you really need to travel with a charger, be ready to connect to your laptop for a top-up or force yourself to turn off some functions.

When I took the new iPhone into the swank new George Street Apple store, the shop was surprisingly unable to sell me a genuine Apple Bluetooth headset because it said regulatory approval was not yet available for the device in Australia. One of the young Apple staff tried to adhere a screen protector, only to be defeated by bubbles under the plastic that wouldn’t go away. And the elegant black leather belt clip case with easy access to the iPhone which I thought would be cheap and readily available, turned out to be not at all easy to find. The only black leather case on sale with a belt clip had prominent and garish white stitching which wasn’t at all what I had in mind. And then the low-resolution (2MB) camera’s fuzzy shots were a further letdown, even though I knew video was not an option.

And yet I would not be without my iPhone. If you stick to the occasional mobile-optimised Web site, sign up to MobileMe and mainly use the phone for calls and iPod-style media, it is a stylish and satisfying experience. The location sensing maps feature works well; I’ve watched my taxi rocket along roads in both Sydney and Melbourne as an onscreen blue dot moving across the map with surprising accuracy. It doesn’t matter that there are no turn by turn instructions such as a dedicated GPS like my TomTom 910 provides, because after all, that’s why you have the GPS, right?

But the best thing about the iPhone are the applications which can be downloaded and installed, either free or for a mostly small payment, from the applications store run by Apple. My favourites so far are:

• Mobile Flickr (for uploading photos from the iPhone to your Flickr account and looking at photos stored in the cloud),
• Remote (for controlling iTunes song playback on a desktop or laptop computer)
• Tuner (for listening to a multitude of Internet radio stations)
• Facebook (for tracking your Facebook shenanigans)
• NetNewsWire (for checking news feeds)
• TalkingPics (for combining text, audio and photos into narrated multimedia slide shows whilst travelling or at conferences etc)
• ShoZu (for accessing a variety of social networking sites within one interface)
• Pianist (for composing, recording and playing piano ditties)
• AIM (for iChat and other instant messaging)
• NYTimes (for accessing that august publication)
• Protopage (for customising favourite widgets, RSS feeds and podcasts between online and mobile interfaces)
• Evernote (for capturing audio, pictures and text, then synchronising with the Web, your desktop and laptop computers with optical character recognition allowing the images to be searchable)
• Twitteriffic (for uploading short reports on your daily activities to followers interested in your day to day thoughts, and staying abreast of what your friends and colleagues are doing)
• VoiceNotes (for recording speeches and spontaneous thoughts); and
• Google (for searching the Web and your contacts on the iPhone).

Then let us not forget the various websites which have been optimised for the iPhone such as the Commonwealth Bank’s Commsec service (which has a cute picture of a newspaper from which you can select information about financial affairs of interest) and Fairfax’s iPhone optimised Domain site.

The 3G iPhone is not as fast or as bug free as I would have liked (for example, the Safari browser not infrequently shuts down during attempts to access misbehaved Web sites), however it is by far the most elegant and interesting mobile phone I’ve had the pleasure to own. The lack of video and poor battery life probably mean you still need your other smartphone (especially if it is a Blackberry). Demanding road warriors should certainly not see it as a laptop replacement. It is no mobile communications panacea. But it makes a useful complement to your existing arsenal of mobile equipment and, as new applications are added for sale via its download library, its utility is likely to grow swiftly and in further, industry-changing ways. For more thoughts on the iPhone’s evolution as a mediacomms phenomenon…return here in coming weeks or follow my daily Twitter (www.twitter.com) postings.