Reports are that the Apple stores had a vastly superior inventory of the little gadgets. Most of the reports I’ve seen place AT&T’s stores pretty low on the customer service list.

I can’t really comment about that directly as I didn’t go to an AT&T store to have a look at the much vaunted iPhone. I went to an Apple store to check it out for myself and not on the opening day. The experience was actually quite nice.

I popped in on the Saturday after the release, so there was still a good sized crowd in the Apple store. However they had a demo table setup with about ten iPhones tethered to it. The important thing was that they were fully functional iPhones.

Now I have to admit I’m a geek, and an Apple supporter. I generally like what they do. So despite what I’m about to say here I strongly encourage anyone who’s interested in the iPhone to go to their local Apple store (or AT&T if you don’t have an Apple store) and test drive one for yourself.

First I have to say the screen is simply outstanding. I’ve not seen anything on a mobile device this size that looked this good. Quite frankly the quality of it blows my Nokia e61 out of the water. The interface is smooth. Windows come and go quickly and beautifully. The touch screen works better than I thought it would. Just a light touch accomplishes what you want.

One of the biggest features I wanted to try out was the virtual keyboard. Everyone has been speculating on how the touch screen would work for keying in text. I have friends who have used touch screen devices and they think touch screens are inferior to keyboards. If we’re talking full sized keyboards then I agree, but in the phone market we’re simply comparing the iPhone’s on screen keyboard with the built in keypads on other phones like my Nokia e61.

So after playing around with it for about 30 minutes which included entering URLs into Safari and a short email message to myself, my opinion is that the on screen keyboard is superior to the keypad on my Nokia. Was it error free? Nope. I made a few mistakes. But I have to say it was far more error free than when I use the keypad on the Nokia. The physical keys of the Nokia are so small and close together that I often hit the wrong one or don’t hit it with enough pressure to trigger a key press.

The iPhone manages to discriminate which key you’re aiming for pretty well. And the pressure required to activate the key press is minimal. I actually wound up typing faster on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard than on the the Nokia’s real keyboard. The auto-correct feature is useful as well, and a feature my Nokia doesn’t have.

So the texting verdict was clear. The iPhone wins hands down for me.

Did I already mention how beautiful that large screen is? Web surfing is a joy on the iPhone. On my Nokia with the built in browser I was used to using a little joy stick to move around the pages. It is slow and awkward. I downloaded Opera Mini for the Nokia and it’s navigation is better, but it also doesn’t display pages the way you would see them on a full sized computer screen. I can understand why they do this; they want to provide the content on the web within the screen size of the device. To that effect Opera Mini does a very good job.

However, the iPhone does it better. The commercial is correct. This is not the mobile internet. This is the full internet. When you load a web page it’s small so that you can see the whole page. You then just tap on the area you want brought into view, or just “pinch” your fingers together on the screen to zoom in on the area you want to see. The most outstanding part of the iPhone Safari experience? You simply use your finger to scroll across the page. Right, left, up, down. Just slide your finger in the direction you want to go.

Safari doesn’t have tabs, which I can understand given the diminutive size of the screen, but you can open multiple pages and then switch between them. It’s a workable compromise, and quite frankly if I’m browsing the web from a phone I’m not that concerned about having lots of web pages open simultaneously.

I didn’t really play with the picture or iPod features, after all I expected those things would just work. The only other thing I was really concerned with was the quality of the phone calls. After all, this is a phone and if it doesn’t do that one thing well then it’s not very useful at all. I was able to place a couple of calls on the demo unit (as I said it was fully functional) and the voice quality was outstanding. Better than my Nokia.

I hadn’t intended to buy one, just check it out. However I was so impressed that I walked out of the store with one of my own.

As an iPod, it’s awesome. Syncing music to it was as simple as using any other iPod. Quality of the music as played is just as good as any other iPod.

As a phone, it’s great. It has the best voice quality of any of the mobile phones I’ve had.

Setting it up was a piece of cake. Within 10 minutes of hooking it up to iTunes my number was switched from T-Mobile to AT&T and the phone was ready for use.

In the long run what will I think of it? Time will tell. But until someone comes out with a device that can challenge Apple’s ease of use and quality of build, the iPhone is my phone.