How could anyone buy these things.

I couldn't buy one of these. It's the price. No matter how good it is. I try not to make a habit of carrying around anything worth over £400.

How may people will be walking along the high street texting away (full focus on the screen as theres no buttons) and suddenly someone whips it out of your hands and is running off in the other direction as fast as they can.

I can't think of anything more expensive that you have to have with you all the time.

You may as well wair a shirt with "ROB ME!" in bright red letters.

ignorant comments

mr. anonymous,

all the people i showed the phone to were my friends who are professionals (read: have money). no one ever balked at the cost of the phone or the fact that the phone is "2.5G." Why? because the typical 3G phone is cumbersome at best to do anything worthwhile online and they are at or near the iphone's price range (treo, n95, 8800 even my slvr was $300). plus $635 isn't that much to spend on a phone. i spent far more in '91 for my pioneer 3 watt car phone ($1200) not including the $300 installation and the $400-$1000 a month in service charges. cuz back then, there were no calling plans. it was $.50/min peak, $.25/min off peak.

so please don't belittle something you know nothing about. that wasn't the point of this thread. people have some good questions. however you:

a. weren't there.

b. you obviously have no experience using the product.

c. you don't place value on UI design

d. haven't noticed it's the fastest selling consumer electronics product in history.

and lastly:

e. so bravely post anonymously.

please don't just post irrelevant statements. guess what? you don't have to buy an iphone. stick with whatever you have. i promise, i won't laugh at you. go back to WoW.

peace.

btw, (20th Century poster) i'm not from LA. but i do know many people there...heh.

20th Century...

"rubbish! buttons are so 20th century"

"melonade!"

pierrenorman - you're not from LA perchance?

Re: the iPhone *is* magic

You seem to have missed out some words from your post. Here, I'll put them back in for you:

1. ... people are usually {pointing and} laughing {at me} and saying things "{what? you paid $635 for a 2.5G phone?} no ---king way" or "holy s--- {dude, $635 for a F-CKING PHONE?!? ARE YOU INSANE???}".

the iPhone *is* magic

I've had my 8GB version for three days now. Some interesting points to answer the queries posted here...

1. battery life is good compared my old motorola slvr. i get about 8 hours of constant usage on the thing. it seems every time i pull this out a crowd gathers and everyone want to use and see it for themselves. people are usually laughing and saying things "no ---king way" or "holy s---". and many are people with blackberrys on them. i don't know what the standby time is yet cuz it's rarely been in standby mode...

2. the phone is fast, i mean really fast! you can't really appreciate it until you use it. screens snap into place with a gracious dissolve that vista or even macosx can't touch. (maybe when leopard comes out?) i loaded 2500 photos from my iphoto library and can scroll through them all in seconds. it's insane. in minutes i went through my photo library, cropped, resized and assigned photos to 50 or so contacts in my address book. a feat that's almost a ridiculous undertaking on my motorola or blackberry.

3. call quality and reception is as good or better than my motorola slvr. also the fact that the entire phone os is still available when on a call is awesome. i'm waiting for an opportunity to get 5 people on a conference call...

4. tactile response??? rubbish! buttons are so 20th century. get with the program people! you are the same ones who laughed at mac's gui in 1986 running xcopy.exe on your dos machines. you get a nice audible click when a character is entered. the typing is so fast and intuitive that i can almost type as fast as i can on a regular keyboard. the magnifying glass edit function rocks too. i would like to see up, down, left, right keys however... also cut, copy and paste are missing as are drag and drop.

5. AT&T's edge network can be slow but it can also be fast. last night i was downloading youtube videos with no problem. email and the web were quick and responsive. For what i need, this is more than adequate. bear in mind, this is real email and real web. forget that crappy wap cell providers would fool you into thinking is the "internet". from what i understand the 3g variant is much more power hungry and would probably reduce battery life significantly.

6. i do miss the flash capability. i mean, imagine homestarrunner.com in flash on the iPhone. seriously folks, that would be awesome "melonade!". i also miss my salling clicker bluetooth remote to control frontrow and itunes.

7. MMS is missing but last night i got an MMS message and it was converted into an sms message telling me to go to viewmymessage.com with an id and password to view the image. interestingly, the image was in adobe flash! which means full flash support can't be far off. the sms implementation is awesome. it resembles the chat sms features on my motorola phone. it stores sms sessions by user so you can have multiple sms sessions going without losing track of your conversations. it's done very well. i imagine a full implementation of ichat can't be far off either...

8. GPS would be nice to have on this phone and would bring iphone up to par with blackberrys, but since i rarely used it, i don't miss the feature on the iphone. Perhaps the next rev of the iphone will have a gps chipset. who knows? i mean i use google maps at my office and it works great and i don't have a gps there. why? cuz i know where i am. sheeesh.

9. did i mention it's an ipod? yeah it rocks too. coverflow is awesome and so smooth that you just have to see it. you'll see little tweeks to the interface that makes you shake your head in wonder. there is so much attention to detail. people who appreciate aesthetics will marvel at this interface.

10. visual voicemail. you will never want old crappy voicemail again. this feature alone is almost worth the price of the iphone. if you get as many calls as i do, it's not uncommon to get 20 or more voicemails a day. now i can see who's left me a voicemail and listen to it immediately without going through the other 15 prior messages.

11. the alarm clock feature i was particularly interested in since have used my cellphones as alamclocks for the last 10 years. the iphone alarm clock function is amazing. like my motorola and blackberry i can have multiple alarms, but on the iphone i can set those alarms to occur say, only on weekdays (so i don't get woken up at 8am on saturdays) or at 8pm on fridays to wake me up before i have to dj.

12. the call plan i signed up for included 900 anytime minutes, 1500 sms messages and unlimited data for about $75 a month. about $20 less than my current AT&T plan. the phone was $635 with tax for the 8GB version. you also cannot get phone insurance through AT&T and apple did not offer applecare for the phone which i thought was interesting... it took me under 5 minutes to acivate the phone, another 30 minutes to sync and load the phone to capacity. i have about 300 contacts, 2500 photos, 1500 songs on the device now...

to summarize the iphone isn't without some obvious ommissions such as third party sdk, gps, movie recorder etc., but bear in mind, this is REV1! apple not only hit a home run, they won the series with their first at-bat! the movie recorder and sdk should be coming soon and some other features i'm sure will be added including flash support and perhaps native MMS. killer apps for this will be access to the terminal, vnc (or remote desktop of some sort) i'm wondering if gotomypc will work on this... hmmmm. ms office or at least some way to edit word and excel docs would be nice too. i don't miss my stylus or buttons at all. btw, i heard apple has sold 700,000 phones already? every sceptic that's used this phone has changed their mind... cheers.