I have had my iPhone about 5 weeks now .The terrifying admission I have to make is that it has made me happier as a person.

I embarrassed to say this because surely life is more than a little piece of flashy and incredibly hyped up andswiped at techno gadget? Of course it is.

But when you get as frustrated with so much geeked up, feature heavy, wow promising, never performing, no wow, fury/cynicism inducing technology as I do, because it’s my job and passion, it makes me happy to have something that works with such beauty and joy.

I think Stepehen Fry said it all with his front page Guardian piece of a couple of weeks ago, but the iPhone is how technology should work and never does. It is not designed by people who know how we ought to use things. It is designed by people who know how technology can be tamed and presented to us for our own use and pleasure.

I use the iPhone all the time, much more than any other phone I have ever owned and I do things on the iPhone just for the pure joy of seeing them happen. Here are my top 5.

1. I go to the calendar and move the date and time wheels just to see them spin and come to a stop. Apple’s underlying design philosophy of recreating reality, both visually and in behaviour, has gone to a new dimension on the iPhone. And because the interface allows you to actually touch and move your fingers as you would if spinning a real wheel, the illusion is complete and magical at the same time. If they could make money out of setting events in my diary, the business case would be in just that.

2. I take pictures. I have hardly ever taken pictures on my mobile phone, though I try and send my eldest a MMS picture message whenever I’m travelling or see some interesting architecture, or let him know what the weather is like. Even though most mobiles have direct camera buttons, it is a joyless and complicated experience. Where did the picture go? Can I send it?

But for all the fuss of the “only” 2 mpx camera on the iPhone, I use it all the time and am constantly showing people the shots, something I have never done before. The reasons are firstly that it is very easy to find the camera on the widget style menu page, secondly, that it’s very simple to use, and thirdly, that I love the spiral shutter animation that opens and closes to take the picture and finally, it’s really easy to find them and show them off, with the magical wiping of the screen to move between each shot and the Harry Potteresque magic of zooming with your fingers. I even like throwing photo’s away, because I loke the way the lid of the waste basket icon lifts and the page then is sucked into it with a dramatic swoosh. It’s a joy.

3. I send many more test messages and keep all the history. Each conversation is kept as a thread of boxes, clear for received, green for send, so you follow the thread. Hardly a new idea but lovely to see and recall information of conversations.

4. Calling people. The hi-fi quality of the voice calls is deep and resonant. I love speaking to people on it, especially through the headset. I’ve heard that people have criticised the voice quality but this seems extraordinary as the quality is so much better than any other mobile I have used.

There are some people I have to communicate with for whom English is not their first language and, on a conventional mobile, it can be difficult to get exactly what they are saying and I end up emailing them. I am sure I am just as difficult to understand when I speak in French on my phone. But with the iPhone, it’s no problem, I can call them and have a clear conversation in a way I couldn’t before.

5. It’s a great iPod, I listen to my music, watch videos, which I didn’t use to before, and love the way that a call comes and then restores me gently back into my music. t’s like a butler, looking after me, keeping me in touch when I need to me and relaxing and entertaining me when I wish.

And I haven’t even started on the wi-fi performance, Google maps, You Tube, the keyboard, brilliant predictive text and magnifying corrector tool.

If I had to find any faults, then the keyboard is the only area where people will feel it is compromised. It does take getting used to, but I quickly realised that if you just relax and type what you want, the corrective text is so good that you will have it 99% right first time. And if you do need to correct, the little magnifying glass that comes up above your picture to show you where to place the cursor is another piece of magic to enjoy.

Because my iPhone is not as official as it ought to be, I don’t get the great network advantages such as visual voicemail, which shows you not just how many messages you have but who sent them. Operators including Orange have had this system for years but never launched it with manufacturers. I have no idea why.

And coming from Apple rather than a conventional manufacturer, there are some things that are different and have to be learnt. Showing the content of a text message on the home screen is something we shied away from when designing the Orange Home screen. It’s a fact that the majority of texts are rude, of a private nature and usually flirting, possibly with someone you may not want others to know about. So dumping the text on the screen was a big no-no with users when we tested our designs. Perhaps Apple will drop that aspect in the net versions.

But every Saturday night for the last month I have found myself holding forth across the dinner party tables of Wimbledon with my new treasure and seeing the awe and love from usually less technically minded people. They too are made happy to see that it is possible for mankind to bypass the over cleverness, complicated, over featured trash that is the more normal experience of technology products.

It was a delight to see the BBC and others try and measure the iPhone against the Nokia 95. The Nokia has a better camera, they shrieked, GPS maps, video and longer battery life. Well, I’m amazed they found one that actually worked, and could then work out how to use it. There is no comparison. If you want a N95, you are very welcome to it. For now the iPhone, and in the future the next generations of iPhone, with 3G and all the other stuff, wipes the floor.

One final note is the amusement I have with the techie community that still fail to understand how and why Apple are so good, especially as they decline to launch beta products and have them “improved by over techie geeks in the open source community. A senior head of research in Orange recently told me of that Apple’s success was due to marketing and that they had persuaded the world that their stuff was better than the rest. He saw it as marketing only, that Apple products were technology inferior, so their success must be down to marketing.

How do I begin to explain to these people. This is no marketing trick mate. Apple stuff works better. It is designed better, the experience is better, it does neither frighten, or condescend. It removes the technology from the equation and just presents us with what we need, in a delightful way that actually works, at least a lot more often that the non-Apple, Microsoft, techie, geeky, lets DIY it in our wonderful open source world.

Get used to it everyone, Apple have done it again. They have moved the barrier so high now that everyone will have to work a lot harder to deliver technology with out people pointing to Apple and asking why the rest of the world can’t work that well.

And by the way BBC, get a move on and make the Beeb work for mac too, or you’ll be out of the loop before you know it.