All of the cool kids got an iPhone a while back. They were willing to fork over the usurious price tag and the silly AT&T data package fees to get the thing, while I had employers who were providing me with BlackBerry phones and Verizon service for free.

I mocked the iPhoners.

I was wrong.

My current employer, who slipped me a BlackBerry when I came to work 10 months ago, just let me have an iPhone on a “two-month trial basis.” That what my employer likes to call it. I call it a “there is no way in hell you are getting this back basis.”

The iPhone is a game-changer. Sure, it still has stupid/annoying Apple non-features such as a lack of a removable battery and no memory expansion slot (the better to soak your wallet with, my dear, by charging you another $100 for a device that contains another $10 worth of memory), but it runs so well, does so many things and does them so effortlessly  that it changes the way people use computers and portable devices.

From the many smooth-running portable apps to the reasonably decent phone (certainly it’s as good as my BlackBerry as a phone) to its iTunes music player underpinnings, the iPhone is a beautiful thing. It’s really impossible to appreciate until you get one in your hands, and then it becomes a creative extension of you — much more so than a personal computer.

Try one for five minutes and you’ll see. I haven’t been this excited about the potential of computing since the first time I started using the Web.