What’s with all the iPhone hate here? Not just people saying they won’t buy it, but a strong projection that anyone who does buy it is morally inferior. Look guys, here’s a hint: we’re not living in Soviet Russia. The way the system works is that companies produce many items, and we, the lucky consumers, choose the ones we want best. Companies (the smart ones) are not TRYING to produce the one single device that will replace every single competitor; like the one perfect pasta sauce (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/20) that one perfect device doesn’t exist, so stop evaluating the iPhone in those terms. I mean christ, even Apple doesn’t pretend macs are for everyone, that’s why PC in the ads is a lovable doofus—- he’s uncool, but Apple’s not trying to make him out as despicable.

As John Gruber has noted, it’s not massively more expensive as the other top-end phones that Cingular sells. Now, there’s an obvious distinction, since Blackberries and Treos and suchlike are more likely to be bought by employers. But I think the market’s there if it works as advertised.

European CTers should also be aware that American providers tend to offer a much blander, more homogenous range of phones, just as American car models are blander and more homogenous than their foreign variants. The iPhone sticks out in the US market.

Every day I see people who are driven and directed by the dictates of their gadgets. They may surf the globe and have friends in strange places and be available 24-hours a day. But in the end, they’ve lost themselves to function, with form all but forgotten. They’ve become avatars made of flesh.

I like the iPhone; but I’m with #23: I’m waiting for the iPhone nano, as it were; a phone-and-nothing-else, as small as possible, that looks good when I have to see it and is otherwise unobtrusive. I have a 40G iPod, and the iPhone isn’t going to eliminate that.

And then you won’t be able to buy iPhones in Texas.

Well precisely. Mobile phone design is far further along than mp3 player design was at that time, both aesthetically and functionally.

iPod did well because it worked much better than the alternatives—as I recall, it had more storage capacity than the available Flash-based music players at the time and it also served as an external hard-drive (I still back-up data to mine when I’m on trips).

Thank you. Apple have been pushing the “it just works” angle pretty hard for a while now, and for all the apple products I’ve tried, it’s actually been true… which is pretty rare in the marketplace.
I don’t want an iPod, or a video player, and I’d probably be better off without internet wherever I go, but I see this as the first real, practical step toward a pocket-top (as it were) computer; one that runs real applications. That’s pretty exciting (scary, even), even if it’s going to take a few years to get good and capacious enough to replace my laptop. When it does, I’ll buy one, but not before.

“But I really do believe that if they could, people literally would be fucking their iPods and Blackberries.”

Well, it probably has a “vibrate” (silent ring) feature. If Steve adds an “endless vibrate” feature, we’ll know he reads crooked timber.

Here is a link to your multi-sim dream

http://www.airtimemanager.co.uk/AdditionalServices/multiSIM.aspx

I do not know how common this is. Academics has left me with just one pretty basic communications device, so I don’t have any use for this service.