For months now the biggest story in the tech world has been the launch of Apple’s iPhone. As an Apple fan myself, I’ve been closely following its development and waiting to get my hands on one for a little test drive.

This afternoon I headed over to the Apple Store at Legacy Village to try out the iPhone. I decided to wait a couple of days to let the crowds subside and get a little more hands-on time. When I arrived at the store it was obvious which table had the iPhones on it, there was a three person deep crowd surrounding it. After about ten minutes of waiting I was finally able to get up to the table and hold the iPhone.

One of the features I wanted to see the most was the web browsing capability through Safari, since most current cell phones are very limited in their web browsing capability. The Apple Store’s internet connection was down, which meant the only way to surf the web was over AT&T’s Edge service. The poor speed performance of Edge has been cited as one of the iPhone’s biggest limitations and it was indeed painfully slow. I decided to visit American Peak to see how it looked on the iPhone. It took approximately 2-3 minutes to load the front page, but once it was completed it did look fantastic.

I took the picture above to show how this site looks on the iPhone. The low quality of the photo is the result of my holding the RAZR’s camera too close to the iPhone, not because of the iPhone’s screen, which is one of the best quality screens I’ve ever seen on a mobile device.

I know I’ve given the iPhone a lot of praise, but it does also have its limitations. Some of the biggest limitations are its price, use of Edge instead of 3G, lack of voice dialing and exclusivity to AT&T. Many early reviewers said that the virtual keyboard would be a limitation, but I had no problem typing with it at all.

In my opinion the iPhone does live up to a lot of its hype and some of its features, particularly its very user friendly interfaces, are revolutionary for a mobile phone. That said, I have no plans to buy one right now. I enjoy my Sprint service and I probably wouldn’t have a need for most of the iPhone’s features on a frequent basis. Maybe I’ll give it another look in two years when it comes to other carriers and the price has come down.