The iPhone is, first and foremost, a cell phone, However, as Apple Inc’s CEO Steve Jobs said when unveiling the iPhone at MacWorld 2009, it’s these three devices integrated together that makes the iPhone such a remarkable piece of hardware. More specifically, the thing that makes the iPhone as such so great isn’t even in the hardware itself – the secret sauce is in the software.

That’s right – it’s the software that makes the iPhone such a revolutionary phone. Not only does the iPhone have easy-to-access speed dial lists, call history, and contacts, but there’s a giant traditional dial pad as well. But most phones have this already, you say, so what’s different here? In one world: integration. It’s in the way that you can easily bring up your friends addresses in Google Maps, the flawles way they sync with Address Book on the Mac and Outlook on the PC, and the convenient way you can quickly assign unique ringtones and pictures to all your contacts. These functions are present to other phones, of course, but they require a Batman-like level of technical knowledge to get to.

Then, of course, there’s the iPod in you iPhone, Apple’s taken everything that was great about the music player you (most likely) already own and they’ve made it even better. Seriously. Instead of the touch-sensitive Click Wheel, you’re got an entire screen to frolic around on. If you tilt the iPhone to the side, you get the beautiful Cover Flow mode, which lets you flip through your album covers like you would on your shelf (assuming you own both albums and a shelf to place them on). Plus, there’s gigantic album art whenever you’re playing a song, one click access to many functions that were up to four-clicks away on an iPod, and convenient integration with the rest of the iPhone’s features. What do we mean by that? How about automatically pausing a song when you’ve got an incoming call?

Lastly, the iPhone ventures into territory previously only explored by hard-to-use smartphones. What do we mean? We mean that it’s a full-featured internet communicator as well. There’s Safari, Apple’s internet browser, which gives you desktop quality web browsing Mail application, which is as close to desktop quality as we’ve seen on a phone this side of BlackBerry communicators. Add to that mini-applications like Google Maps, whether, stocks, and YouTube, not to mention web-based applications and the inevitable future software updates and new applications from Apple, and you’ll feel comfortable leaving your laptop behind whatever you go.

So why go with an iPhone when you could go with a smartphone that has similar functionality? For one, there’s never been a phone with an iPod built in. Using an iPod compared with using the media players on other phones is like the difference between flying from LA to New York first class and driving there in an old Pinto. Both will get you to your destination, but one gets you there in class, style, and comfort, while the other makes you want to give up and go home before you even start, Expend this concept to the all the iPhone’s features, and you’ll understand why the device is so innovative.