It's nifty, but it's tied to Cingular, which has an abysmal data plan that would easily take an individual's cost past $100/mo. And without a data plan, a lot of the extra functionality is seriously hamstrung.

I'm hoping, but expect to be disappointed, that Cingular will offer a special cheaper data plan available for this phone only. Time will tell.

I'd agree: colour me impressed. The thing is big, that's for sure. But that is one sexy phone.

Dammit. Now my What Phone To Buy problem just got harder.

Yeah, the iPhone really didn't do much for me in concept. But what they released is pretty sweet. When my Sidekick finally dies, I may have to consider moving to it, even though it would involve switching carriers. Maybe in a couple years it'll be open to other carriers.

Since it's running OS X, we're closing in on my ideal of the wearable computer that's also a phone. All it needs is a dongle where I can plug in a monitor, keyboard, etc. And a bigger hard drive. But given the 80GB hard drives in the iPods, it's getting closer. Then I can be a total gargoyle!

The Apple reps at the show said that they were still trying to decide whether to open up the platform to 3rd-party developers or not. Even if it runs OS X, for all we know it's running OS X on an ARM processor with all sorts of unknown APIs, so without an SDK this may not be very hackable.

That being said, the interface is SLICK. I haven't been this excited about a mobile product since the original Pilot. Please let them open it up to developers to play with...

(Note that the original MIThril systems were perfectly usable wearable computers with just 1GB microdrives, heh heh.)

All it needs is a dongle where I can plug in a monitor, keyboard, etc.

Of course, if you did that then you'd lose most of what makes the iPhone special — the whole interface is designed around the combination multi-touch screen + accelerometer.

From what I've heard the platform is closed, though Apple does plan to register third-party app developers. No clue how those apps would get onto the phone. Of course, Safari is something of a back-door into the walled garden, since you can sync bookmarks and (presumably) run Javascript (and hopefully Flash).

My two concerns are whether the calendar is as good as my Datebook-5 and whether their multi-touch is really as good as a physical keyboard, but having seen the demo I'm convinced by the trade-off of only having the keyboard around when you need it.

Oh, I'm thinking long term when it has enough computing power that it can be my only computer. I definitely want all the convenience of the mobile interface as it was demo'd. But there are times when I want to use a big-screen monitor and type fast on a keyboard as well (like when typing a paper). And there's no reason I should need to use a different computer to do that if the iPhone is running OSX and has decent hard disk space. I want the power of AND, not OR.

It's not there yet, but in two more years, it'll be pretty darn close.