Have you seen Tim (Internet Pioneer) Bray's post on why he's less-than-excited by the iPhone?

It's pretty funny and, by the way, right on the mark.

I don't wanna be a sharecropper on Massa Steve's plantation. I don't want to write code for a platform where there's someone else who gets to decide whether I get to play and what I'm allowed to sell, and who can flip my you're-out-of-business-switch any time it furthers their business goals.

Impolitic, but funny.

On the other hand, he writes, Android is "more modern in its feel than the other mobile SDKs I've looked at, and the amount of new stuff I'm going to have to learn is much less, and the platform has no intrinsic lock-in that I can spot."

His larger point is that those phone things we have in our hands that we're also supposed to be able to surf the Web with are still really disappointing.

From a developer standpoint, they're like revisiting feudalism. Or staking your fortune with 19th century robber barons.

From a user standpoint, they cost too much, they're too inhibiting, too fragile, take too much effort to maintain (i.e., to charge up, wipe off, etc.) and are reliant on networks that are too unreliable to be believed.

Still, as Joe Wilcox described, they show enough potential to fire up our imaginations with images of the possible.

Hey, boss, can I have an iPhone?