At its original price of $600, I thought Apple's iPhone was an overpriced toy. But now that everyone who absolutely had to have an iPhone has bought one - and Apple has conveniently dropped the tariff to a mere $400 - I decided to take a closer look.
After a few weeks of fooling around with one, I can report that the iPhone is, indeed, a fantastic gadget - a stunning example of industrial design that borders on art.
On the other hand, I still wouldn't buy one for everyday use. In fact, most of us can get the iPhone's most important bennies from a newer Apple toy that's a better value- the iPod Touch. More about that later.
Just in case you've been off-planet the last few months, let me describe the iPhone for you: a slim, hand-held, do-everything gadget with a sharp, 3.5-inch touch screen display. It plays digital music, browses the Web, sends and receives e-mail and text messages, snaps photos, plays videos, shows maps with satellite photos, and lets you buy tunes online. It also makes phone calls.
The iPhone performs many of these chores with greater elegance than any other smart phone or PDA -but unfortunately, not all of them and not always the right ones.
One problem: Apple's exclusive, two-year deal with AT&T. You can't use an iPhone - legally at least - with any other wireless carrier. If you have another service provider now, you'll have to pay a stiff termination fee to switch. And then you have to sign a two-year contract with the former Cingular (rebranded under the AT&T label), and be willing to settle for AT&T's slow, second-generation Edge network for the Web.
Neither ranks high with consumers, a fact Apple tacitly acknowledged this week when it noted that 250,000 iPod buyers haven't bothered to set up AT&T accounts.
That means they've broken through Apple's security and are using their iPods with other carriers, or they're waiting for someone to make that easier for them. Or, they may not care about the phone part of the iPhone at all.
In practice, I had relatively few problems making calls. My issue was the effect of AT&T's performance on the iPhone's otherwise astounding Web browser. The iPhone is a Web wizard if you can tap into a local Wi-Fi hotspot, but excruciatingly slow if you have to rely on Edge.
In fact, if they gave out Pulitzer Prizes for programming, the guys who created phone's hand-held version of Apple's Safari Web browser should get one - maybe even two. iPhone's Safari redefines the notion of what a hand-held can do on the Web.
