SINGTEL will finally begin feeding its hungry customers Apple's iPhone 3G tomorrow, but before you make the leap, make sure this most-coveted consumer device matches your needs.

Let's get some things out of the way. The iPhone 3G is a huge improvement over its predecessor, the original iPhone, but if you're looking for value for money, you're barking up the wrong tree. Practically every other handset manufacturer offers better specifications for the same price range.

Also, even though it's been cheekily dubbed the Jesus phone due to the hype that's accumulated around it, the truth is that the iPhone can't do everything. There are just some needs it can't meet.

But if your requirements fall within the narrow confines of the iPhone's numerous restrictions, then you'll find that it's in a class of its own. Power is nothing without control, and the iPhone proves that ease of use is the single most important factor when it comes to touch-screen phones.

One of the easiest demonstrations of this point is address books. On the Samsung Omnia, for example, flicking your finger to scroll through your contacts often results in entries being accidentally selected as your finger brushes past them. You'll never have this problem with the iPhone. It's the little things that count, especially when we're talking about repetitive tasks.

The single best reason to buy an iPhone is to surf the Web on the go. Nothing displays Web pages more elegantly or accurately than Apple's Safari Web browser. The Opera Mobile browser comes close, but still clearly falls short. And the browsers that come standard with most phones are so far inferior as to be in a different league altogether.

Many popular websites, such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Plurk and Meebo, have versions specially optimised for the iPhone, and offer unique appearance and functionality.

It's tempting to put this down to some Faustian pact between Web developers and Apple, but this would be confusing the egg with the chicken. It's Safari's abilities that have allowed people to develop special features for it. No other mobile browser would be able to implement the same experience. If you use Google Calendar to plan your life, for example, view it on the iPhone and you will probably be sold on that alone.

Then there's music. Phones don't all have the same sound quality, and the iPhone is effectively an iPod, with all the great sound quality and useability that comes with it. If a call comes in, your music fades out and pauses, only to seamlessly fade back in after you hang up. It's the little things, remember?

Phone and data reception strength varies within SingTel's 3.5G network. Some iPhones seem to have better reception than others. An Apple spokeswoman says that the latest iPhone 2.0.2 firmware update is supposed to improve reception issues but there hasn't been enough time to test that claim.

Battery life is decent, with a few caveats. You can surf the Web all day long - along with making calls and sending text messages - without worrying about power consumption. However, continuous data transfers sap energy startlingly fast, so if you plan on keeping your GPS on in the car, or watching YouTube all day, you'd better have a power socket nearby.

More problematic is the ravenous nature of Apple's push e-mail system. Unlike Google's Gmail e-mail service, Yahoo accounts can be configured automatically to push e-mail to your iPhone the moment it's received by the server, instead of being manually retrieved at preset intervals.

But using push notification with Yahoo e-mail drained the iPhone's battery by half within a scant two hours. It's hard to imagine battery usage with corporate Outlook e-mail being much more parsimonious.

This brings us to the inconvenient fact that the iPhone isn't particularly adept at handling e-mail. Apple has obviously put a lot of work into making the iPhone compatible with Microsoft Exchange, which powers most corporate e-mail servers. But what's the point if the interface doesn't handle things efficiently?

There's no way to select all your e-mails at once. If you want to mark them read, you have to manually select each e-mail and wait for each to load. And even though you select several e-mails to delete together, again you can't select them all. If you get hundreds of e-mails a day, this kind of set-up just won't do, especially since Blackberry devices do all that and more.

And, of course, the iPhone doesn't have a physical Qwerty keyboard. The virtual touch- screen keyboard is actually extremely good, but no amount of practice will make the average person type as fast as he would on a Qwerty one.

Rounding off the list of restrictions is the inability to forward SMS text messages, copy and paste info, transfer data via Bluetooth, or download files to your iPhone from within Safari.

That's a fair bit to chew on. But you might well be perfectly happy without those extra features. For instance, when's the last time you synchronised your mobile phone's data with your home PC using Bluetooth?

As long as you're honest about your needs, and can embrace the iPhone's limitations, you'll be a happy camper. Just make sure you don't kid yourself.

This story was first published in The Business Times on 21 August 2008.