Almost everyone else in the blogosphere has said stuff about the iPhone. It is very tempting but I've fallen. At least to say something before we have seen a product is a get out.

I have a Sony Clie PalmOS PDA, a Sony Ericsson phone and an iPod and an iPhone could be a neat replacement for all three. It'd certainly save time and complexity in syncing the stuff around. But the battery life on the phone is fantastic, the storage capacity on the iPod is wonderful and the text input on the PDA is the best of all three. Therefore to have a single device replace all three - is a hard act. The Clie has Buetooth, WiFi, a camera (no flash), plays music and has a card slot. The Sony Ericsson phone has Bluetooth, camera (no flash), plays music and has a card slot. The iPod (4G photo) has no Bluetooth, no WiFI, no card slot but plays music and has a huge store.

So the iPhone can have WiFi, Bluetooth, plays music, has apps, has a camera. It probably will cost (initially) the same as buying a new iPod and a replacement PDA. Even if the phone functionality is as good a normal Sony Ericsson phones then I could be tempted to replace the PDA and phone with it. The naysayers who place the price as too high are comparing it to a phone rather than seeing it as a new iPod with all the other stuff.

The bigger questions for me are about the platform as a means to deliver apps and services - being able to use WiFi instead of the phone; being able to use efficient data transfer mechanisms on the mobile networks. Having the apps, integrate with the phone and mobile data experiences.

I just hope that this is the first in a range of mobile devices from Apple that converge the mobile voice, data with a hand-held computing device - and better than the preceding historical devices: the Newton, Palm Pilots, WinCE, Windows Mobile, Treo, Blackberry and Symbian. There are a lot of lessons to be learned and incorporated.

We shall see...starting in the USA in June. Though they seem to be more concerned with the choice of mobile carrier.