Well I pulled the trigger and ordered a 16GB 3G this week. It should be here in 10 to 20 days (which means a month I assume).

It was an interesting shopping excersize - apparently I'm the only guy in the history of that store to have prepared a comparison chart showing the 2 year cost of the different options (and the different providers). I had 3 store employees ignoring their other duties for 20 minutes to study this. What? Do most people just buy stuff based on color? The 2 year cost is the only valid comparison, since the contract lasts 2 years on most of the plans.

Anyway, I'm pretty stoked! The more I think about it, the more amazing this little doo-dad seems to me. It's a GPS/HighRez Media Player/Wi-Fi/programable palmtop computer/Camera/bluetooth/4-band Phone all in the palm of your hand.

The Apps opens so many doors it's amazing. There's one where you can hold it up to a radio, and it'll listen to the song, cross check some on-line database, and tell you the song/author/etc.

For hunters, you can take a picture of your favorite spot, it'll date it and GPS log the coordinates you were standing on for finding it again (supposedly at least - for me this was a big deal, and why I didn't want one that just works on cell-tower triangluation but has an actual GPS chip in it).

There's a voice-to-text feature (called Jott) in there that syncs with your calander, so supposedly you can just say reminders into it, and you're done, it'll put them on your calander. (We'll see how well that actually works).

With the GPS you can download an App (called Box Office) that will tell you the local movie times wherever you are - along with directs on how to get to that theater.
Etc, etc, etc. The posibilities with this thing are amazing.

I'm an engineer, and so love RPN calculators. Those are hard to find, and usually cost $60 minimum (for a cheapy). Or, turn my iPhone into one w/ an app.

Through your wifi, there's an app (Called Apple Remote) that lets you access your PC's HDD in such a way that rather than being 16 GB MP3 player, it's a 250 GB MP3 player (if you have that much on your desktop that is).

From a hardware standpoint, I wonder if I can make it into a modem and so use my home computer or laptop access through the 3G network? (probably not on a non-jailbroken phone I bet, but would be interesting to explore).

I'd like to put a simple spreadsheet and workprocessor on it - maybe an OpenOffice Lite or something, and plug in an external keyboard. Wallah, who needs a laptop anymore? (Doubt you can do this yet though). I'd like to be able to sync w/ my home PC's Calander program (e.g. Outlook).


I can't wait to see what they replace this thing with in 2 years - it just doesn't seem you can get any more amazing. And then they surprise you yet again. Stay tuned for my upcomeing "duuuude, I just dropped my iPhone " thread!