Paying full retail ("unsubsidized") price for any other smartphone or PDA in AT&T's catalog frees the buyer from a term commitment and opens up pay-as-you-go and data-only rate plans, as well as plans that let you use your device as an Internet gateway for a notebook computer. Not iPhone — it is truly in a class by itself.

The Bottom Line Apple iPhone Apple, http://apple.com AT&T, att.com Fair  4.9 criteria score weight Messaging 4 20% User interface 7 20% Extensibility 1 15% Voice capabilities 5 15% Application support 5 10% Multimedia 7 10% Value 6 10% Cost: $499 for 4GB Flash memory; $599 for 8GB flash memory; requires $36 activation fee plus 2 years of AT&T wireless service at $59.99, $79.99 or $99.99 per month; other options may be available to current AT&T subscribers Platforms: Apple iTunes (free download) on Mac or Windows PC; AT&T Wireless coverage with 2-year contract; Apple ID (free registration) Bottom Line: Consumers looking for a gadget fix and who don’t mind paying $60/month for it will be delighted by the iPhone, which is effectively a heavenly widescreen, Wi-Fi iPod with PDA and browser functionality. But for professionals, once you get your feet off your desk and get down to business, excitement gives way to deep disappointment. iPhone is trounced in professional features, including 3G, VOIP, push to talk, IM, voice dialing, and much more, by all comers within $200 of its price range. And because it's a closed platform in the iPod tradition, these absent features can't be added by creative third parties. Apple and AT&T ruined iPhone for the professional handset market. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Apple and AT&T created the world's first nonprogrammable $500 mobile handset: No Java, Flash or native applications can run on iPhone. That means that the innumerable features found in other $500 smartphones, PDAs, and Pocket PCs are absent in iPhone. Those include: voice dialing; Bluetooth stereo-headset support; VoIP over Wi-Fi; instant messaging (Web alternatives exist, but they don't signal you on incoming messages); audio recording; standards-based tethered and over-the-air sync; remote lock-down and management; Bluetooth file transfer; movie recording; rich document editing; offline document and Web content access; mail viewing with HTML images and JavaScript disabled; mail rules; MP3 ring tones; video and audio codec support beyond QuickTime media types; access to non-HTTP TCP/IP ports and protocols; and so much more that won't be added until Apple decides to do it. And since Apple never discusses its plans, there's no way of knowing which of these limitations it will attack with future software updates. But one thing is certain: If Apple doesn't do it, the company won't let anyone else do it — at least not legally.

Screen meets keyboard
You already know iPhone. It's a 3.5-inch glass LCD with just enough metal and plastic wrapped around it to hold it together. There are four tactile buttons: home, volume up, volume down, and power. Everything else, including the QWERTY keyboard, shows up on the display.

iPhone's display is touch-sensitive to the extreme. It is designed for fingertips, not for styli. Most stylus-sensitive mobile devices also respond to the touch of a finger, but the stylus comes in handy as a proxy for a mouse, which most Web 2.0 applications expect.

iPhone needs a stylus as an option: There are places where the pad at the tip of an adult finger spreads out on pressure to cover an awfully large swath of display space. The result is a human interface that responds beautifully to grand gestures such as one- and two-finger sweeps to scroll content, and two-finger pinching and spreading to zoom out and in, respectively.

But if user interface controls are packed too closely together, which applies to most Web sites with forms, it's impossible to aim for a radio button or a check box without slipping and activating an adjacent control.