http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo700w/?creativeID=LF...

Hey omfg and it does just as much and it has apps you can install for it... AND it's not carrier exclusive... AND it's a hell of a lot cheaper... AND it's not apple made, meaning it probably won't break the first time it falls three feet.

"But wait, that doesn't have 4GB of memory storage!"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820211067

HOLY CRAP! SD Card came WAY down in price since the last time i looked apparently! But yes, combine that with the Palm and it's still way cheaper even if you go with the more expensive carrier. If you need more space than this for MP3's or what not, ... then maybe you had best be looking at something other than a phone for that aspect of your life... like a Zune or Zen...

Edit: Oh yea... and it has been available for quite some time now. So apple is really not breaking any type of new ground at all.

OK Apple fans, don't look directly into the RDF when Steve is giving a keynote...you should know better than that.

I need an Apple phone like I need an a**hole on the elbow.

I personally hate Apple because of the zealotry they seem to inspire in their otherwise technologically undistinguished customers.

But all that aside, I'm sick and tired of the "Apple moves into market created by someone else, develops and releases a moderate product to great fanfare (See Apple zealots), and almost immediately come the predicitions of Apple's conquest of that market. The only market Apple has anything approaching a reasonable share of is the MP3 market (players and songs). Everyone talks about MS using illegal tactics to enter and dominate new markets - Apple controls approx. 70% of the MP3 market - they've used propiretary formats and closed ecosystems to turn that into a dominant share of online music sales, and in turn will now try to deploy that dominance in the phone business.

To use a lame, lame quote from Episode III: "This is how [innovation and customer choice] dies, to thunderous applause."

Just read: No user-installable apps on the iPhone.

http://www.tuaw.com/2007/01/09/iphone-will-not-allow-user-installab...

If this is true... oh well. It was nice while it lasted, it looks great, but that's a dealbreaker for me. No sale, Apple.

And i just bought a Qtek 9000 PDA, well looks like i must have one of this baby's too :)

Cisco go go go

newsflash to apple...

iPhone is taken.

I am a construction worker I want somebody to come out with a phone that doesnt break when you look at it wrong or drop it. I dont need any of the fancy BS just good reception a phonebook and the durability to last for more than six months without breaking. Build me something like that and I am all over it. The iPhone wouldnt last a week doing what I do. It would be hard pressed to last more than one day doing what i do.

I don't think you understood what I was trying to say.

Oh, I did.

Your mistake was deciding to elucidate that point with a retarded example, when the detail at hand was a truthful statement.

Which not only makes your point off topic, but pedantic, and in this narrow instance wrong.

But thanks for playing!

I don't quite understand why they are limiting this phone in the US market.

Cingular is the largest provider in the US, but not by a huge amount according to Wikipedia (59.8m).

Releasing this phone generally and in the US and for CDMA would have allowed both Sprint (53.7m) and Verizon (57m) to use the product and that would have given the phone another ~110m possible buyers.

Considering the phones price and function, I'm sure it's already gonna be a niche market item. Why further niche that by choosing exclusivity?

Not saying you're wrong, just that Wikipedia might not be the best source of information, by design.

I guess only if you choose to not believe their source.

http://www.cdg.org/technology/2g.asp

* Increased talk time for portables

You don't get increased talk time as a feature of the technology without efficient power usage.

Of course that comes from the actual CDMA standards group website.

So I guess we should assume they lie?

But the thing is, CDMA phones pull more power, and either have less battery life or bigger batteries (= more weight and more thickness).

Hmm. According to Wikipedia that's untrue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_standards

Dunno why they didn't call it the ApplePhone and be done with the iPhone trademark issue.

Anyway, for the class of device, it is a good price, and to be brutally honest from the videos shown it makes all the competitors look like coracles going up against an air craft carrier. Everything about the user interface looks properly designed for the task.

Having had to write software for Pocket PC / WinCE / Windows Mobile, and use them, I can say that the Windows Mobile smartphone platform leaves a lot to be desired. Of course that comes from hands-on experience which no-one has with the iPhone. But if the videos of usability are a fair representation, then you would be rather retarded to look at any device but this iPhone come June for your smartphone needs, unless you had a corporate requirement.

RIM will be okay. They have the corporate contracts. Symbian and Windows Mobile ... that's another issue.

For the rest of us who get free phones with contracts ... this is not the phone for us and never was. However I wouldn't be surprised to see a less-functional lower-end phone from Apple in the future - a nano iPhone as it were :)

you people bitching about the price don't seem to know what smart phones are going for today.

the current top of the line smart phones out now cost as much or more than this, and offer less functionality, such as:

HTC P3600 - over $700
O2 Stealth - $599
Treo 750v - over $700
XDA Trion - $699
Sony Ericsson P990i - $599

I assume that was a typo and you mean going GSM gives them world wide reach? I agree unfortunately. GSM is the dominant technology outside North America.

For selfish reasons I wish they went CDMA. My work is programming CDMA base stations and I might have had an opportunity to play with one at work if it were CDMA. We get most of the CDMA smart phones to test, though I usually don't bother with them, but this one really peaked my interest.

Edit: that was supposed to be a reply to #47

It's just a smart phone. A nice one to be sure, but nothing special. I might consider one if it was less expensive. Given the mortality rate of cell phones, $500-600 seems a bit too steep. It will be interesting to see how well these move and how fast the price comes down. The sweet spot seems to be $200-300. I guess Apple priced these figuring iPod+phone = $500-600. I don't think it will fly.

I have a Motorola V325 flip phone. So far its held up pretty well. Its been dropped from 20 feet up off a building and lived. It lived through the my hands are covered in gas and I have to take an important call test. I havent tried the drop it in a containment full of diesel fuel test yet. I try to avoid that one because it usually does really bad things to a phone.

Yeah usa construction work is hard on alot of things phones included. Ask most any construction worker you almost always have something that hurts somewhere. Its just a part of the job.

Maybe it's because I don't have a phone but the whole mobile phone market is really boring to me.

What? No Turbo-3G?

no replacement batteries... no expansion slot... no outlook synchronization.. apple only applications?!?

carrier-exclusive availability?!?

not too promising in my opinion

Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, which is US only. Going CDMA gives them worldwide reach without added expense. The real question is why aren't they letting T-Mobile sell them.

As Buub points out CDMA is popular in Asia: Japan (#2 KDDI) and China(#2 China Unicom).

So GSM as a singular worldwide choice would be a poor one.

Japan has gone crazy over cellphones. It seems like everyone there has one and are constantly using it. If there's a place where a phone with the capabilities of the iPhone might sell more broadly than just as a niche, it'd probably be there.

So again, I'm deeply confused by Apple's business suave in this situation.

They are releasing the phone only in the US and then only to roughly 1/3 of the total US cellphone market.

I'm no Steve Jobs, but that seems like a marketing blunder if I've ever seen one.

Edit: Adi states SK is CDMA too, that's not an insignicant market either.

Really the tech side of it is irrelevant to me. GSM and CDMA both work and I doubt it's that hard to make the phone do one, the other, or both.

I'm just looking at raw numbers here and I'm seeing a singular market launch, of a niche product, into a minority portion of that markets total subscribers.

Hell, from a worldwide perspective, the US isn't even the biggest cellphone market.

http://www.3gamericas.org/English/Statistics/3.cfm

Looks like a recipe for failure to me. The next Newton?

Demo of the unit in action:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

If it works this slickly, I'm all over it. However, as a Cingular data customer at present, I can tell you that Cingular could screw up a ham sandwich ant that is the limiting factor. We'll see if the data transfer speeds are good enough.

Sweet!

Now if only I were made of money -- or, if it were more like $300. Not only is six Franklins a ton of money to pay up front, but pulling a $600 media phone out of your pocket is a good way to get mugged.

If only this was on a CDMA network so that I could actually use it inside my house.

Apple's new phone is pretty slick, although the price is a major obstacle. A phone's lifespan is awfully short to pay 500-600 bones for one.

Without corporate email integration like Blackberry or GoodLink has it cannot compete in that space no matter how good it looks.

As an owner of a PPC-6700 (HTC Apache) Windows Mobile, I've already paid nearly that price for an interface that's painfully slow, buggy software, garbage battery life, replacement styluses that go flying like insults at Mac fans, and a 1GB miniSD card. I did get it soon after it was released, and the more recent software is better (they finally added a keylock feature!), but it still has significant shortcomings. Some with the phone, some with the software.

I'd almost given up on a multifunction phone, going the small Bluetooth phone + laptop route, but this would make me reconsider.

I expect in a few months, every tool in the Bay Area will have one of these.

Sweet. I want one. That full-unit-size screen is sick, and the touchscreen may be the best thing since sliced bread.

I want to see one up close first, but I'm pretty sure I've seen my next phone.

Usual 'made by Apple, it's a revolution' attitudes expected of course, but how is this all that different from the existing stock of Windows Mobile phones like the HTC Wizard? I guess it's slimmer, but it loses the keyboard, so swings and roundabouts there.

The screenshot with this article also looks extremely like something out of Windows Vista, not MacOS (I know Vista took OS X on board design-wise, but it looks scarily like Aero Glass).

I like Multitouch. I've been expecting it for over a year.

No way I can afford one right now, but this will almost certainly be my first cell phone when I do get one.

GSM? EDGE? Meh. I guess the WiFi makes up for the slower bands, but only if you're near an access point (or you're in SFO). Then again, I'm not even sure if you can download music/movies/TVshows directly to iPhone.