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Iphones have become the benchmark of modern communications technology with their smooth integration of web, camera and video content, but they're also a status symbol. An unlocked Iphone 3GS costs over half a grand, so it goes without saying that only the cream of the crop get to wander the streets, tapping away at the screen as if their life depended on it.
But even the most rural areas will be familiar with the Iphone to some degree thanks to a strong advertising campaign in various media. If you're looking for a new phone the first name you think of is Apple...then you see the price and go for a Motorola RAZR for £50 instead.
Okay, so the Iphone 3GS, the third incarnation of the Iphone since the original design in June 2007 and its follow up, the 3G, from 2008, may be expensive but Apple are struggling to cope with consumer demand nevertheless. There's no doubt that they've paved the way for other companies like Nokia, LG and HTC to create their own 2G and 3G phones and blackberries with high speed MMS, Wi-Fi and GPS apps that finally work after the slow, unreliable WAPs that made basic browsing such an ordeal in the 90's.
Before the Iphone, mobile phones were going nowhere, not just in terms of abysmally slow WAP content and crap cameras, but in pretty much all areas. They looked boxy and clunky and only came in black or silver (or, inevitably, pink for the chatty 14-year-old girl market who probably single-handedly kept mobile companies in business in the late 90's and early 00's).
The Iphone began life as the Newton Message Pad in 1993 (extinct PDAs that looked like little black Etch-A-Sketches, came with a pen and had handwriting recognition software), but the core idea for the Iphone was kick-started by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who wanted to investigate the touch-screen arena, while the final 'all screen' look of the Iphone was down to Apple's Head of Design, Jonathan Ive.