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Jonathan Richards

Click here for a gallery of iPhone images

There are lots of things you can buy for £269. A return flight to New York, a year's subscription to The Times (with some change), a pair of this year's Christian Louboutin shoes.

Everything you always wanted to know about the iPhone . . .

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Instead, Apple wants you to spend it on a small lump of metal and glass which, depending on who you believe, is either one of the most revolutionary electronics devices ever to have come on the market, or rather over-hyped.

So - is it worth it?

Based on two hours of ‘play time’, this reviewer would say: most certainly yes. Provided, as is the case with many Apple products, that fashion matters to you and you're willing to put up with the fact that some of its most useful features are cramped by the slowness of the network it runs on.

If not, you might want to reserve judgment and play with a friend's before you break your contract with your existing phone operator and sign up for an 18-month minimum term at £35 a month, which is what you'll have to do if you're not with O2.

For the uninitiated, the iPhone is a 11.6mm-thick phone, e-mail server, music and video player, internet browser, personal organiser, camera and photo-storage unit rolled into one. It will be available in the UK from 6.02pm on Friday.

It represents a significant leap forward from anything else on the market and people who fail to exclaim even a quiet 'Wow!' when handling it for the first time will seem unreasonably disenchanted.

The ease of navigating around using the giant, 2.4 x 4.5 inch ‘touchscreen’ - which takes up the whole front face - is remarkable.

There is a single button at the bottom, which always takes you back to the homepage. Otherwise it's a combination of sliding - or gently touching - your fingers on the screen that makes the features come to life.

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