Without much fanfare, my iPhone passed its three month birthday a few days ago. That's long enough for the honeymoon to be mostly over (at least, it was with my earlier smartphone). So what do I think?

First, this is the first phone I've owned in many years which I didn't actively hate after three months--the last phone I really liked for a long time was a Nokia 8000-series phone from about 1997 or 1998. I don't remember the model, but it was tiny, chrome, and had a nifty slide-out keypad cover. So the iPhone passes the not-loathing test, which is unusual right there.

On the positive side:

1) The web browser works really well. The browser in my Treo sucked canal water, so I never used it. I use the iPhone for surfing the web all the time, and I never thought I'd get this addicted to having a browser in my pocket.

2) Google maps is awesome, even without GPS. The best part is live traffic information, which is really helpful during rush hour. If a future revision includes GPS, then the maps function could be a killer product all by itself.

3) YouTube is fun, and even though I don't use it all that much, the kids do. It's sometimes a useful way to distract them so I can get something else done.

4) Video podcasts are a great way to pass a long flight. The big screen makes the iPhone almost as good as one of those portable DVD players, but smaller and fits in your pocket.

5) This is still the coolest gizmo around. Even after using it for three months, it still seems like something which dropped through a time vortex from three hundred years in the future.

Observations which are neither positive nor negative:

1) Stocks, weather, notes....meh. I use them very occasionally, but if I had the option, I'd probably want to ditch those in favor of something else.

2) I'd say I'm about equally as clumsy on the touchscreen keypad as I was on my Treo's mini keyboard. I've come to rely on the autocorrect feature, though, and every now and then it won't correct something and I'll text She Who Puts Up With Me something like "I'm kwabumf the office now."

3) The iTunes ringtone maker sucks, but Ambrosia's iToner now works with version 1.1.1, and that rocks. I didn't really care about ringtones until Apple messed it up so badly.

4) I don't really care about unlocking or jailbreaking my iPhone, so the whole kerfuffle about version 1.1.1 really didn't matter to me.

5) The $200 price drop also didn't matter to me, but the $100 credit was pretty cool. We used ours to buy a nice pair of Bose ANR headphones.

Negative stuff:

1) No to-do list? Oh wait, I never used the to-do list. Nevermind.

2) Since 1.1.1, the iPhone won't automatically connect to our home wifi network: we have to go into Settings and choose it manually from the list of available networks. This may be because our home network doesn't broadcast its SSID.

3) Safari is still unstable, and crashes every now and then. On the other hand, the crashing is so very subtle you sometimes don't even notice it: in the worst case it drops back to the home screen, and sometimes it simply has to reload the open pages when you select Safari.

4) Mail is cumbersome, but mostly because it lacks just a couple of features. If it did rules filtering and junk mail filtering and made it easier to delete multiple messages, that would solve most of my complaints. It's still better than on my Treo, which froze regularly when I tried to read mail.

5) Some sort of copy-and-paste function would be very helpful.