Feel it in your hand.  Run your finger across it.  Flick left.  Now right.  Try up and down as well.  Bring your fingers together, now apart and watch the size change.  Feels amazing, doesn’t it?  Is it heavier than you expected?  A little more substantial?

That’s the way I felt when I touched an iPhone for the first time today.  I’ve read all the hype and a lot of the reviews, but I have avoided the iPhone in person.  Today I held one for the first time and it really feels like Apple has just changed the game a bit.  I’m not even sure I care about the phone piece of the picture – everything else was enough to keep me entertained.  I didn’t get to use it on a WiFi network, but I did get to try it while running on the Edge network and understand why people would be unhappy with the performance.  It would be nice if that part was faster.

It was a great experience and definitely made me want to use it more.  If you are not ready to hand over your hard earned money to Apple and AT&T you better not touch one.  You may just find it is impossible to put down.

I bit the bullet and went with a new 15″ MacBook Pro @ 2.33Ghz and 2GB of RAM.  I figured it would be a little faster, but everything, I mean everything, is much faster than my faithful 15″ G4 PowerBook.

I was really impressed with the Migration Assistant that Apple supplies with their OS.  It transferred everything from my old G4 PowerBook to my new MacBook Pro flawlessly.  All of my settings, browser favorites, iTunes library, iPhoto library, etc.  Everything.  I was able to logon to the new one exactly like my old one and just start working.  Very nice job Apple.

Oh, and it even made Google Reader better to use.  My G4 PowerBook used to get hung up in Reader and the processor would hit 100% causing the fans to come on.  Not any more.  It blows right through all of my items like a hot knife through butter.

Overall this thing looks a lot like my old PowerBook, but the screen is way brighter and has a higher resolution.  So far there is not the least bit of buyer’s remorse that I usually feel when I spend money.  I’m feeling pretty good about this one, and my wife gets the benefit of getting my G4 PowerBook to replace her extremely old G3 Tangerine iBook that looks like a Hello Kitty purse.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past 30 hours you know that Apple announced, and demonstrated, their entry in to the enormous cellular phone market. With the introduction of the iPhone (if that name sticks) Apple intends to go after 1% of the close to 1 billion cell phones that were sold in 2006 – a meager 10 million phones.

It is a really slick looking device, and everything that you would expect Apple to release; cell phone, iPod, and Internet Communicator that has a full browser, mail client and a text messaging application that looks a lot like iChat. From the specs it looks like they did a nice job with size, weight, battery life and screen. So with all that is right with the iPhone what could be wrong?

I can only comment from the specs that Apple has made available, but here’s a list of things that worry me:

• With up to 5 hours of battery life when watching a video, the iPhone makes a great wide screen iPod. This is what I have wanted for a while. The problem I see is what happens on that flight where I am watching videos and run the battery down? Not only have I lost my iPod but now I don’t have a cell phone I can use.
• Typing on the virtual keyboard might be difficult without any kind of response from the keys like a regular pager or cell phone. As a plus at least the keyboard is QWERTY as I am nowhere near as fast on my cell phone as I was with my old Skytel pager.
• No 3rd party applications. I’d love to run Skype or Adium on something portable like this.
• Cingular only for at least a couple of years. I’m a Verizon customer and could possibly be convinced to switch to Cingular, but how does their data network stack up against EVDO for performance and availability?
• There is not enough storage to replace my existing 80GB iPod. I could live with less storage space but if I wanted a Nano I would have bought one in the first place. I need more space than 8GB.
• Price. I don’t care how you slice it, the iPhone is too expensive for me with a 2 year commitment. I realize that there is a ton of very cool technology in this little phone, but I’m not so sure I can cough up that kind of money for a cell phone.
• Yahoo mail? That’s nice, but before I spend 600 bucks on a PDA it damn well better connect to our Exchange2003 system at work. I know many of you don’t care about Microsoft and their products, but some of us make our living in that space and need that kind of connectivity. OWA via Safari is not enough. I was hoping for wireless Active Sync support.
• It has a camera, but why no iChatAV for video conferencing?

That’s the list I can think of off the top of my head. For all the things I listed I am still pretty sure that Apple will sell a ton of these. As an Apple stock holder I hope they crush that 1% goal and nab 5% of the market. I know I am looking forward to seeing the iPhone in action and have a bad feeling that once I actually get to hold one I will be sold.

My wife is going to kill me.