I've been traveling the past three weeks, and during most of that time I used the iPhone as my main computer. I learned far more about the pluses and minuses of the iPhone during those 21 days than I did during the rest of the 14 weeks that I've owned the device. I still like the iPhone a lot, and remain amazed and in awe at some of the things it can do. But there's a lot about the iPhone that's frustrating.

My journeys started three weeks ago at the InformationWeek 500 conference, where I spent four days. I had a laptop with me, but it stayed in my hotel room, where I only had access to it an hour or so a day. The rest of the time, I used the iPhone as my Internet browser and phone.

After that, I was off for two weeks of vacation (with a couple of days in the home office in between). That was when I gave the iPhone a real pounding. I didn't bring my laptop computer with me, and so relied on the iPhone for Web access, e-mail, music and audio, and of course used it as a phone.

The Amazing iPhone Web Browser

Even before my travels, I'd been making heavy use of the iPhone for Web access, and so there were few surprises there. The iPhone does a superlative job as a Web access device; you can use the iPhone to view well more than 90% of the pages you could access on a desktop computer. Apple has clearly worked hard to make sure its browser works well with the overwhelming majority of Web sites, without modification of those sites.

During the trip, I used the iPhone to do some online banking, paying several bills through my bank's Web site. And my wife was able to use the iPhone browser to buy airline tickets; she researched the flights and paid for them with her credit card, all using the iPhone's Web browser. I knew the iPhone's browser was terrific, but didn't know it was that good.

The one important thing I couldn't really do from the iPhone was access my company's e-mail. We're standardized on Lotus Notes Version 6, and the Webmail interface requires Microsoft Internet Explorer for full functionality. So I did have to visit public Internet terminals several times on vacation just to get access to a Windows computer running Internet Explorer.

However, on the last days of vacation, I discovered that I could access a version of Notes Webmail that runs in browsers other than Internet Explorer. I couldn't see what was read or unread, and I couldn't reply, but I could at least scan the "from" and "subject" lines of e-mails and identify messages that needed to be read immediately.