In a recent survey by ChangeWave, the iPhone is receiving a customer satisfaction rating of 92 percent. (By comparison, Blackberries receive the second-highest rating, at 50 percent.) At the risk of sounding like another Apple cheerleader, I have to admit that I’m one of these customers.

But I hadn’t expected to be.

I haven’t had good experiences with PDAs and smartphones. The Treo 650, for instance, was a nightmare when it came to bulk, reception, and sound quality. And gradually the idea of hunkering down over a tiny glowing screen with a stylus seemed less and less cool. A friend reminded me, “You work in an office—you should want to spend less time at the computer, not more.” So I bought the simplest clamshell I could, resisted the temptations of the Crackberry, and felt liberated from my gadget obsession.

Then the iPhone ad campaign began. I admitted to myself I was curious, but I reminded myself how much I hated smartphones and tiny screens. I had trouble believing that any touch screen could be genuinely comfortable. I’ll go see a floor model, I thought, and that will be that.

Of course, that’s like an alcoholic walking into a bar to look at a “floor model” of the latest brand of vodka. Once a gadget freak, always a gadget freak. I went to my local AT&T/Cingular store after work—after the lines had died down and the mobs had left it looking like the remnants of a party: dirty floors, disorder, and a significant number of stragglers snapping up the final stock. I asked myself if I wanted to be one of these people. One guy received his new iPhone over the counter with a classic air of paranoid covetousness—like Gollum possessive over his precious (and it should go without saying that there is significant overlap between tech early adopters and Lord of the Rings devotees). The staff had long since run out of the decorative gift bags.

“You bought into the hype, man, you got sucked in.” These are the things that reformed early adopters say to each other. My friend wouldn’t even look at my iPhone he was so disgusted. “I swear,” I said, “I went in to look at a floor model.” And that’s what I had done. And the next day I found an Apple store that hadn’t sold out, and walked out self-consciously transporting, through a crowded mall, the black decorative gift bag that is a mark of pride or shame, depending on your state of mind.

What sucked me in?

First, the iPhone is aesthetically pleasing. Second, it’s a pleasure to use. And that’s about it.

It’s not because I need to check email away from the computer. It’s not because Web surfing is absolutely essential wherever and whenever. It’s not because I get to listen to music while talking on the phone and chatting and emailing and surfing the Web and looking at photos and using Google maps and popping off a beer cap with the built-in bottle iOpener. And after all, the iPhone’s greatest innovation is that it does less than any other smartphone!

Really, it comes down to intriguing innovation in user interface that is hard to resist. The touch interface makes it enjoyable to surf the Web—the only small device I’ve used for which this is the case. And when I say “enjoyable,” I don’t mean merely “functional” or “tolerable,” and I’m not saying that what it does is more useful than other phones; it’s just fun—justifiably unnecessary.

The best way to describe why this is so is to say that the iPhone decreases the distance between you and the tasks you’re trying to perform. That’s an immediacy that technology usually takes away via mouse, keyboard, and stylus interfaces. Getting to use your fingers, on the other hand, is satisfyingly basic—even primal. Hence the iPhone may also be the anti-gadgeteer’s gadget in the same way that the Wii is the non-gamer’s video game. And both I see as an extension of recent trends in social networking, which have become successful by lowering the barrier of entry for users and applying principles of simplicity and immediacy that Google and Apple have adhered to for some time.

The only question left, of course: will it blend?