Hi this is what Maasberg personal technology columnist from the Wall Street Journal and this is the week for months people have been going crazy about this forthcoming device called the iPhone from Apple.

Here it is it goes on sale Friday at 6:00 PM.

And in the 16 years I have been reviewing tech products, I cannot remember any product having this kind of hype and high expectations surrounding it.

So it was quite interesting for me to be testing it the last two weeks I conducted my tests in a number of cities on both.

At East and West coasts I used it in airports and Starbucks and my house and office and Fenway Park in Boston on streets and.

It is certainly the most beautiful and the most radical smartphone or handheld computer I have ever tested.

Starting with the physical you can see it's very thin.

It's actually thinner than, for instance, the Samsung Blackjack, which is quite a skinny phone.

And yet it has this enormous 3 1/2 inch screen which takes up most of the front of it.

It does not have a keyboard, it uses a virtual keyboard on the screen and when this was first announced by Apple in January, when the phone was disclosed, I was among many, many people who thought this was a real dealbreaker feature.

I have to say that.

Three days into testing the thing I wanted to throw it out the window because the keyboard was so difficult to use and I was so slow and making so many errors on it, but.

Five days in I suddenly found that I could type as well as fast as I have been typing on my trio's physical keyboard for years, so my conclusion is that the keyboard issue on the iPhone is a non issue.

The phone has a tremendous web browser.

The best I have ever seen on a handheld device.

It actually shows you the real layout and the real totality of the web pages you're looking at.

It doesn't rearrange them or stack them or do all the funny things that you're used to on a phone.

And if you want to zoom in and read a section of a web page, you just double tap with your finger.

The email program on it is also very PC or computer like it shows you a preview of the email and if, let's say there's a photo that's been sent in the email that photo you don't have to click separately to see it.

It shows up right there in the email.