Everyone’s happy with the iPhone, for now.  

What a surprise! A new survey shows that just a week after iPhones hit stores, their buyers still love them. The honeymoon is still in full swing. 

As reported in USA Today, 90% of 200 iPhone users said they were extremely or very satisfied with their devices. Eighty-five percent said they would recommend the iPhone to others.  

That survey was conducted by Interpret LLC, a “next-generation media and market research firm,” about a week after Apple Inc. released the iPhone on June 29. Chances are iPhone users will have plenty of time to find something to complain about.
Battery power comes to mind. And anyone who bought an early-generation iPod (hello me) recalls how much they loved the new MP3 player until the thing crashed. Heck, my iPod died four times (replaced with a new one every time by Apple). So we’ll se what the future holds for iPhone and its happy owners. 

After all, some folks over at AppleHound found 68 bugs with the iPhone as of July 14. Sixty-eight sounds like a high number, but as the AppleHound poster noted, finding the bugs was difficult because the OS X GUI and applications are “extremely solid.” I think just about everyone is expecting to find bugs in a first-generation mobile device. But some flaws can be pretty costly, as SPI Labs found out. The iPhone’s Safari Web browser allows users to dial any number on a Web page by tapping the number. The research lab at SPI Dynamics found that this feature can be hacked so that attackers can redirect phone calls, track calls and create plenty of other problems. 

The Interpret survey of happy iPhone owners also offered a snapshot of what the iPhone launch means for Apple and AT&T, the mobile carrier with exclusive rights to offer the iPhone to its customers.  

Thirty percent of iPhone buyers said the device was their first Apple product, meaning that the company is definitely tapping new customers. And more than 50% of respondents said they were using a mobile service other than AT&T before buying the iPhone. This means that about half of iPhone customers left their old mobile carriers and signed up with AT&T so they could spend up to $600 on a new phone. And 35% of those who left their old carriers paid an average of $167 to break their old contract. Perhaps some of those Sprint customers who were fired by their mobile carrier for complaining too much were actually happy to be dumped.  

But what about the business uses of iPhone. Will it find a home in your company? Will your road warriors burn their BlackBerrys and demand iPhones? Most of the CIOs I talked to in January were cool to the idea. I’m starting to get pitches for stories from ISVs that have developed business applications for the iPhone. I’ll be talking to vendors over the next few weeks to see what they have in store.