I always love the long term reviews in Car and Driver. Once the honeymoon and glowing initial review of a new car fades away, what are we left with for the long haul?

It’s a day and age of disposable technology, fan boys, flame wars, and license nuts. Amid that muck, I reflected on my first year with the iPhone. Never one to buy the first release of anything, my trusty Sanyo Katana had to be retired and I was dragged kicking and screaming into a local AT&T store to buy a first gen iPhone. My business partner incessantly waxed poetic about his then 6-month old iPhone, so I figured I’d give it a shot…

The brilliance of the iPhone lay not in it’s feature set or spec sheets. It has it’s short-comings like any product. What is brilliant is how well the pieces work together to make the daily experience pleasant and unobtrusive. A small example is the built-in Clock app. While easy to set alarms and countdown timers, it shines by what it doesn’t offer: screen after screen of unnecessary and arcane options. It’s flexible in a scary mind-reading kind of way when it’s needed, but that’s not the point. The designers made this little app clear and quick to use so I don’t dread using it; I enjoy using it. It’s like that with many of the apps, built-in and third-party.

It invites me to enjoy it. The parts I don’t enjoy I can keep out of sight.

I came to this conclusion shortly after buying it and it hasn’t changed after a year of daily use: what separates the iPhone from the others is beyond the spec sheet and it’s beyond features and benefits. It’s pleasant on a visceral level. That’s not easy to achieve…