Where do you start!? The Apple iphone 8 gb is a fantastic little piece of equipment........unless you want to;
1: Make a phone call,
2: Send a text message,
3: Take a decent picture (day or night) or video,
4: Send or receive any picture messages (mms).
5: The "home" button is constantly breaking.

So really, the iphone (in my opinion) is just there for the image.
I got my hands on one of the second generation versions of these on a contract with O2. At first i was amazed by how good it looked and operated....and it DOES look good! But the main things (for me) in a phone on the market place today were just lacking.

I'll address the issues in the order above.

1: The loudspeaker is anything but! This means hands free calls are near on impossible in even a slightly busy environment. So if your calling any kind of call centre, you need to keep the phone next to your ear until you finally get to talk to a human!
2: The phone has a basic text sending facility. The one thing it lacks (which again, i find very useful on my other phone) is the ability to forward a message. so, if you receive a nice invite somewhere, you have to type the whole thing out yourself to invite someone else...you just cant forward the original text.
3:The iphone has a famously bad camera and no flash or night time mode. There is also no function for taking video. Need i say more!!?
4: Any picture you might manage to take has to be sent by email. Not by a simple (and cheaper) mms. This is the same for anyone who tries to send you a picture. Everything is over the Internet.
5: One of the few buttons on the iphone, and yet the perhaps the most important. IT CONSTANTLY BREAKS!!! you need to press this after doing anything to enable you to return to the home screen. If (sorry, when!) this doesn't work, you have to shut down the phone completely and then reboot. this process takes about 2 minutes. Just pop a search in google and you'll see this is a very frequent problem for many people.

The iphone does however have great applications you download (some are even free!), and is fantastic for web browsing. It is of course an ipod, on which you can store (nearly) 8gb of music. This does depend however on how much other data you have stored on the phone.

In all, this phone is sold on its looks and stylish image. Is function and practicallity as a modern phone are limited.

I would not get another until these problems have been fixed, so therefore would not recommend it as a purchase. If Apple do manage to sort these out, then i would jump at it!