This Sunday’s Opus comic strip captures the hype perfectly.
I did get to play with one for a few minutes at an Apple store in Maryland yesterday. It handles its primary job (being a phone) very well. The sound quality was good. The interface really is as clever as the advertising suggests. A quick finger swipe moved whatever you needed in the right direction.
Typing with the iPhone turned out to work better with your index finger than with your thumbs. Whatever logic they’ve got in there for guessing what you meant when you mistype something works extremely well though.
That said, I don’t see myself coughing up the dough for an iPhone anytime soon. Functional and attractive as it is, I don’t need that much of an upgrade over the Razr (which while it has plenty of shortcomings, fits nicely in my pocket and only cost me $100). Besides, if version 1 of the iPhone is this good, imagine version 2 😉