2. The Good, Continued

On another level, the operating system's closeness to Mac OS X should allow a wide range of applications to be used on the phone, with relatively few compatibility issues except for adapting to the small screen and touch input capabilities. The Windows Mobile operating system is much less directly compatible with Windows for PCs.

Wide screen video

Another feature that really impresses me is the iPhone's media functionality. You see tons of phones that advertise MP3 playback and storage space galore. Most smartphones use XS, mini-SD and even CompactFlash cards for storage. There's a benefit to card-based storage, because you can change your storage capacity quite easily and store different content on different cards. However, the iPhone enjoys a serious advantage because it uses a higher capacity hard disk drive.

Many smartphones are difficult to hook up to a computer because of drivers and related software. Connecting the iPhone to a Mac or PC should be as relatively transparent as linking an iPod to iTunes.

Like many smartphones the iPhone can connect to the Internet. A wealth of free and pay-for-use data such as maps, ring tones, songs, images and videos are already available and Apple likely will add more data and help you get to it with an iPhone-to-the-Internet iTunes-like interface.

Apple and iPhone logo are owned by Apple Inc.

Finally, the iPhone carries Apple's unique and highly marketable caché. The company has already managed to get a large part of the world's population primed and waiting expectantly for the coolest of the coolest of cool smartphones. What could go wrong? Funny you should ask.

For composing SMS messages the iPhone displays a keyboard.