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So, let’s see how the phone compares to an iPhone. Well, it does EV-DO, so it can access the net faster than an iPhone…. just like my PPC-6700 and just about every other web-enabled phone on the market even six months before the iPhone’s launch. It has a full QWERTY keyboard, just like my PPC-6700 which is over two years old. It has a microSD slot, which is minor improvement on the miniSD slot on my PPC-6700, and is commonly found on web-enabled phones these days, including the PPC-6800, which is a refresh update of my phone. Does it have multi-touch? No. Does it have a proximity sensor? No. Does it have video voice mail, AFAIK, no. Oh, and the screen. There are two of them…. and they both suck.

Each of them is QVGA resolution (one in landscape, one in portrait mode). QVGA has been available in phones for years now (indeed, my PPC-6700 has it). I can tell you from first hand experience that that kind of resolution just plain sucks for browsing the web. Yes, specially designed mobile services can work fine with it, but you need more pixels to do the job right. Frankly, I’m embarrassed for the whole US mobile phone market. When the iPhone was first announced, it’s 480x320 resolution seemed to me as too little too late. QVGA phones had been on the market for years, and overseas you could find full VGA phones without looking too hard. It seemed like by the time the iPhone landed on the market, 480x320 was going to seem about as lame as the iPhone’s EDGE network. Wow, was I wrong about that. I don’t know what the problem is, even the OpenMoko project has a VGA phone, but the monopolies powers in the cell phone market seem to be preventing the concept reaching consumer’s hands.

So here’s a new rule: I don’t expect everyone to start shipping VGA overnight, but you can’t call a phone an “iPhone killer” unless it has one screen that is at least as high a resolution as the iPhone’s. You also have to be embarrassed at each new phone announcement where you don’t have at least ONE phone on the market that can match or exceed the specs of the Neo 1973.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the don’t walk sign was flashing, so we were both stuck on the corner for a bit. Eventually, the car signal went from green, to yellow, and then to red. For a brief moment, the iPhoner’s brain misfired, and he somehow concluded that the red light meant it was now time for him to cross the street.

I say a brief moment, but he had enough time to get three or four steps out in to the street before he realized his error, and in that hesitant, diffident, and embarrassed manner that only geeks really ever master, he turned around and got back on the sidewalk. I could see the shame in his eyes: he had just exposed how uncool he was.

Now, I am a geek myself, and while I usually don’t walk out in to the middle of the street, I probably have geeky lapses like this several times a day. So I’m not about to poke fun at this guy for that. This stuff happens. What amuses me is what happened next.

In a desperate attempt to regain his composure and air of confidence, he brought up his iPhone to eye level, and started randomly fidgeting with it. As far as I could tell (based on his hand gestures), he was just scrolling through something, probably his contacts. He rubbed his techno-worrystone for a couple of seconds, and then lowered it back by his side.

His self-assured air had returned. He was cool again, because he’d just played with his iPhone. In that moment, I was forced to realize why Apple keeps winning the image battle with the techno-elite.

Apple sells something better than more speed, more capacity and more capabilities. Apple sells cool in a box.

That in itself was not a revelation to me. The painful realization that flowed from this moment, was that we geeks crave/need cool more desperately than any other segment of society, and for the most part we need it to be as straightforward to obtain as opening a box, because the road to cool involves dexterity or social skills, we’re screwed.

I had to put this in the “continue reading” section to encourage more page views ;-) :

In case you didn’t already know it, the iPhone went on sale today at 6pm.

I hereby pledge that if the total AdSense revenue from this page exceeds the cost of an iPhone + a 2 year contract, I will buy one. ;-)

From a hardware perspective, there really isn’t much that’s exciting about the iPhone. It’s features match up pretty well with my 6700 (the 6700 doesn’t do 802.11g, the 6700 is CDMA and can use Sprint’s EV-DO data service, its camera’s resolution is somewhat lower, and the 6700 has a mini-SD slot).

The form factor is different. The iPhone is slimmer, and in order to achieve that it gives up the slide out keyboard (which is really nice). That’s an interesting trade off, but one that other manufacturers have gone with, although I think Apple is the first to completely eschew any kind of keypad.

The user interface is different. If there is anything innovative about this phone, it’s going to be the UI, but of course multi finger touch screens aren’t exactly new. I’m not sure what exactly Apple has “patented the hell out of”, but I could see where this could prove to be a killer feature.

Personally, a stylus is a nice way to avoid fingerprints on my screen, but otherwise it would be nice to throw it away. Still, the PPC-6700 is currently available with $100 manufacturer’s rebate, which makes it roughly 2/3 the price of the iPhone, and also suggests there will be a new model out shortly, and this is months before iPhone even launches.

Compared to the options available for WinCE phones, the iPhone seems kind of lacking to me. The only asset it really has is that it isn’t marketed by Microsoft, who have done a horrid job promoting WinCE phones.