I posted a tweet on this but felt that it needed a bit more detail.

I have now owned or had come through my house five iPod / iPhone devices -

1. an older style iPod (5th gen I think);
2. an iPod Touch 16gb;
3. an iPod Nano (my wife's);
4. an iPhone 3G 16gb;
5. an iPhone 3GS 32gb.

That a lot of hardware that has cost me and my family a lot of money.

Ignoring the standard iPod's for a moment the Touch to iPhone upgrades that I have made have been on the back of wanting more: more connectivity, more memory, more functionality. That's not to say that the Touch wasn't a good device, it was. The introduction of OS 2 and the App Store gave it an amazing lease of life, showing what an amazing platform Apple was developing.

But unless I was near a wifi network it felt held back, like a car with only 3 gears. The apps only highlighted that even more so.

Equally the iPhone 3G is a great device, adding connectivity to the equation. The 3G element gave fast data to an already strong platform.

And now there is the iPhone 3GS, bringing a far better camera, video, more storage and a generally faster overall experience in main usage. This device cost me a small fortune but I never had a second thought about it.

So why do I feel the need to upgrade outside of the main added features? I realised the reason why only a few days ago. And it really surprised me. The iPhone covers 75% of my daily needs of the internet. And the iPhone excels -

• Twitter - I never expected to be addicted sending and reading tweets but I am. I have and continue to meet many interesting people who have interesting things to say. The iPhone has many Twitter apps that make using the service on the go a dream. Twittelator Pro is my favourite at the moment.
• Web - the iPhone's Safari browser is very impressive, allowing me to do almost everything that I want to do at any time. The only thing that it misses is a Flash implementation but I don't hit too many problems with that at the moment.
• Email - similar to the web usage, the in built web client is fine for my basic needs and OS 3 has added server side searching.
• IM - I never was much of an IM user but seem to have got in to it more and more over the last few months. With the push notifications that OS 3 introduced IM works just as well as text messaging. I use BeejiveIM.

When you consider where we were with mobile technology only a few years back it can be nothing short of amazing how far we have come in devices and expectations.

I love my iPhone. Apple have me well and truly hooked and I'm not complaining.