Updated: Read our full review of the Apple iPhone.

At Macworld in San Francisco, we [ MacFormat ] were among a privileged few that were allowed to play with the new iPhone during a special briefing with Apple's Vice President of Marketing, Greg Joswiak. We're pleased to announce that the experience was an extremely good one.

The first thing that struck us was how little like either a phone or an iPod the iPhone looks. The fact that the entire front face is taken up by the screen means that, at first glance, there's really no clue as to what the device does.

Joswiak summed this up by saying that Apple has no desire to be a 'me too' company. What isn't in doubt, though, is its attractiveness. It's extremely thin and sleek, and just holding one in your hand makes you feel like you're experiencing the future.

Despite this lack of girth, though, there are no concerns that it may bend or snap. The iPhone is as robust as any iPod.

A new breed

Naturally, we rushed to try out the touchscreen. Concerns have been voiced about how effective this might be. Well, we can tell you that there's no need to worry on that score. Every flick of our finger was registered as we moved through the tracks stored in iTunes.

We found that you could easily control how quickly you scrolled by moving your finger faster and slower. The only slight problem we had was that we occasionally selected individual albums by mistake when we made initial contact. However, we suspect that this difficulty would go away as you got used to the sensitivity of the screen.

Next, we experimented with the Safari web browser. This was even more rewarding. Firstly, any website we selected loaded reasonably quickly, and in full - unlike the patchy pages you get if you use a WAP phone. Secondly, the zoom and resizing feature worked tremendously well. A quick double-tap on anyarea of a website brought up an immediate close-up, while 'pinching' the entire page gave complete control over its size on-screen.

The iPhone passed through the hands of eight sweaty journalists, and the screen didn't look at all dirty or smudged when it came to us. We have to say, though, that it's glossy in the extreme, and the potential for both fingerprints and scratches is certainly there.

Going back into the iPod features, sound quality through the on-board speaker wasn't great. We doubt that there will be many users who choose to listen to their music at the low volumes that the iPhone can manage. With the exception of an extremely loud Green Day track, we struggled to hear the songs we played over the conversation around the table.

Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to actually make a call. However, a quick skim through the phone features threw up no problems. We also tried writing a quick text message. The lack of tactile feedback on the touchscreen initially felt very strange.

However, once we got used to it, we had no trouble selecting individual letters, despite our bulky fingers. The slight downfall in this area is that it's impossible to do any form of touch-typing, as you simply can't tell whereabouts on the keypad you're pressing. You need to look at the screen at all times.

Flash or hard drive?

Before we left, we also wanted to ask Joswiak about the possibility of a hard-drive-based iPhone appearing in the future, rather than Flash. We're hoping for larger capacities than 4GB and 8GB. Unfortunately, the answer was most certainly negative. "Flash gives us nice advantages, including the fact that we can do this nice form factor," Joswiak pointed out.

Overall, though, the iPhone worked exactly as Steve Jobs described in his Keynote speech . The Multi-touch technology is undoubtedly a huge success - we're not surprised that Apple is patenting it so ferociously! Russell James