I am drooling. Big time.

It'll cost me an extra $200 to break free from T-Mobile in June, but I intend to start saving TODAY for my iPhone... I have a family plan with T-Mo, but I won't break both lines since my wife could care less about the iPhone :eek:

I can't wait to see the Quicktime version of the keynote when they put it online this evening... The stills captured by engadget looked darn impressive so the actual video must be incredible.

Maybe Apple's branding will help make small internet tablets more mainstream, but I'm just not seeing what the iPhone has that, say, the Nokia 770 doesn't. The incredible hackableness of Nokia's offering makes it much more appealing to me than Apple's closed product.

Watch the Keynote, you will see. No static webpages will do this device justice. I watched the Keynote last night and was AMAZED by what this phone might be able to do.

Luckily, I am already with Cingular but will wait until my 2 year contract with this phone is up in October. Hopefully they will get all the bugs out of it before then.

Michael

I concur. I followed the stills posted on Engadget during the keynote by hitting refresh every 10 seconds (fun), but when I watched the iPhone intro last night (all 80 minutes of it...) I kept saying to myself what amazing technology it is. The scrolling action has to be seen in action -- it's simply amazing.

The last 15 or 20 minutes of it are just Steve and the Google, Yahoo!, and Cingular CEOs stroking themselves and each other. And rightfully so. I think they have a slam-dunk here.

What closed?

Dude, it uses the same APIs as Mac OS X.

Every Mac developer can be an iPhone developer. That is something that Symbian/NOK has never figured out.

I'm willing to bet that this device will be easily unlockable within a month after release.

When that happens, if Apple really isn't to sell this direct without service, I'll sign up with Cingular, pay the 599, break my contract for 150, and continue using T-Mobile.

Between the iPhone and the Nokia N95, it's actually a hard decision.

You might be on to something...... If Cingular is really only $150 to break a contract and T-Mobile is $200, that would actually be the way to go. Plus, think of what you'd save in terms of monthly data charges ($20 versus $50!).

I suspect you wouldn't be able to get the visual voicemail to work since that seems kind of network-dependent, but other than that I can only assume it would work.

Speaking of visual voicemail, it seemed to me (not being anything close to an expert in the field...) that the voicemails are packaged up as little audio files and downloaded to the phone (a la an MMS or SMS message). So elegant, yet so simple...

This is me playing the world's smallest violin for not having visual voicemail:

You see that?

How about now?

Now?

Oh well.

I thought I heard something -- like a teeny, weeny violin... :D

I agree it's not a deal-breaker - especially if I can get the phone to work on T-Mobile's network. I don't get enough voicemails at any one time that it would make a difference. I'm just intrigued by how they do it.

Note that I'm not talking above about Symbian devices, but the Linux-based Nokia 770 and 800. They have a very hackable software stack based on the Gnome desktop environment, very easy to port to, nice high-level development tools like PyGTK. Higher resolution displays than the iPhone, but a lot less storage. Great development resources at http://www.maemo.org/. Note that these aren't phones, but internet tablets.

Maybe the iPhone will force Nokia to drop the price on their Linux devices, anyway.

Edit: See this from the comments on the main 43folders thread:

If I'm going to pay big money for a portable computing device, hackability is a big priority for me. Maybe not for most people, but certainly for me.