I finally caved in a sent Steve Jobs a £400 get-well-soon note. I bought a 16GB 3G iPhone.

Jailbreaking and unlocking worked perfectly, Virgin mobile PAYG is happily powering the phone.

The App Store is brilliant, although unusable. There's so much crap in there, I have to rely on recommendations and 3rd-party reviews, which is annoying. So perhaps someone might find my choices useful:

Oh my home screen I currently have, other than the built-in apps:

• Remote
• Byline (read and sync with Google Reader, brilliant application!)
• Tweetie (Nice twitter client)
• London Tube (Maps and route planning)
• Fring (IM and calls for Skype, among others)

From these, only Fring is free - I was hesitant at first to pay for random apps, but after I've seen recommendation for most of them, I bit the bullet. If Apple had a try-before-you-buy scheme, I'm sure that a lot of developers would earn more money, and if the downloads that don't turn into sales are a good metric, a lot of crap could be filtered out.

I use Byline daily, loading app feeds before I leave home. It will archive the full post, with pictures, and also the actual item, meaning that I can read sites where they post only snippets of the actual content. It will sync read, starred and shared items when a network connection is available. It has made my tube journeys feel a lot shorter! Highly recommended.

Other random stuff:

• Games: Galcon
• Facebook
• Google & Google earth
• Now Playing (brilliant app for movie theatres)
• Stanza (haven't used that yet)
• Dictionaire (nice free, offline dictionary app)
• Translator (uses Google Translate)
• Pocket guitar (gimmicky but fun guitar simulator)

Things that have impressed my girlfriend: Apple Remote (control iTunes remotely) - she giggles every time she changes the volume or selects a new song. It's doubly impressive because we use airtunes to pump music to remote speakers, where no computer is in sight. Now Playing, when it showed our two nearest cinemas with movie listings. Pocket guitar, when she shaked the phone and it bended the sound.

I'm also dabbling in jailbroken apps, if only because I have to jailbreak the iPhone to add a Greek keyboard. Thanks to iKeyEx I can create my own custom keyboards (which I'm afraid I'll have to do).

If you have killer iPhone apps, please share in the comments!