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Stephen Fry is an actor (perhaps best known to Americans for his roles in the Blackadder series), writer, gadget lover, and quite possibly the most hard-core Apple lover you or I have ever seen. Famously claiming that he “never met a smartphone (he) didn’t buy,” he now owns multiple iPhones which he carries around with him to fill different purposes: “mad hacking, jailbreaking and frigging about with, another as a pedometer, another for music, another as a – guess what ? – phone.”

In an extensive post where he talks about the iPhone—covering the market before it was released, the pre-release backlash (pre-lash?) from naysayers who said Apple was foolish to enter the cell phone market, and finally Apple’s success—Fry lays out his wishlist for improvements: all of which are common calls (cut ‘n’ paste, Flash support), but all of which aim to make the iPhone more flexible to the needs of the user.

...the real mystery is not how Jobs and Ive and their team made their breakthrough with such conspicuous speed and success, it is how the might of Symbian, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Microsoft could have bestridden the market for so many years without so much as making an attempt to satisfy, please, solace and ease the smartphone experience: even a quarter of Apple’s imagination, creativity, innovation and delight in technology would have been something.

And after all that (I told you it was extensive), Fry gets down to reviewing the latest “me too” post-iPhone devices, the RIM Blackberry 9000 Bold, the Storm, the Experia X1, and of course, the G1 Android. All of them have some of the features that Fry calls for in the next generation of iPhone, but do they match up?

Read on at Stephen Fry’s blog for a long but not rambling set of reviews by the funniest and most level-headed Mac Zealot you’re ever going to meet.

Via [stevenfry.com]