Last night I watched the 20 minute introductory movie for the iPhone. Pretty interesting! (Although the presenter was, to me, a little freaky. Just personal opinion.) The amount of hype and attention given to the iPhone is overwhelming and threatens to actually turn me off of it. Nevertheless I was impressed by what I saw of the iPhone’s capabilities. Things I particularly like are the auto-switching from portrait to landscape mode that it makes when the user simply turns the phone; the YouTube app; cover flow for flipping through iTunes albums; Safari web browsing; Google Maps functionality taken to a whole new level; and the highly intuitive and useful phone capabilities such as the way to set up conference calls. Yes, this thing has many different capabilities but it is a phone, first and foremost. And I think that really, the “killer app” for this phone is its phone capabilities. (Duh.)

When I first heard about the iPhone and blogged about it earlier this year, I wondered mainly about how easy it would be to use it for inputting text. The movie shows more detail about this aspect but frankly, it doesn’t appear to be any easier to input text than I had originally thought. Apple claims that users who stick with the virtual keyboard will be highly proficient in typing with it in about a week, more so than with any other phone/keyboard device. Somehow that seems doubtful to me.

Another interesting aspect to the infomercial was the complete absence of any demo of the phone’s built-in camera. This isn’t a big deal at all for me; I think the marriage of most cell phones with cameras is a bad idea.

Finally, I still have a major concern about the limited built-in memory (max of 8 Gb).

But why am I bothering to write about something that I probably won’t be able to afford for a very long time, and would find hard to justify spending the money on? Well, because I think it is a very cool product and I am really hoping that it lives up to, and exceeds, all of the hype.