I didn't think Manjoo's first take was bad at all. Who knows how the thing will actually work? One would assume, naturally, that all the complexity is adequately supported and engineered, but we can't know that. It's a fair possibility to raise in trying to avoid the label of uncritical Mac apostle.

Cingular? Well, we've heard the worldwide usage reasons. It makes sense. I was just in NY visiting a friend with Cingular, and she never had a problem. I've heard lots of people bitch about Cingular in the NY area. Me, I've got Sprint, and nothing could be worse than that. As to Cingular's EDGE, I think I recall reading that the phone can switch to wifi wherever available, a concession from Cingular, so this may indeed be a moot point in a lot of travel and home locations when it comes to the web applications.

Price? Same friend in NY has tech-crazy boyfriend who rushed out to pay $500 for whatever the damn phone is they both use. I saw it, and it sure as hell ain't anywhere near as cool as the iPhone appears to be. He's a chip designer for Intel, and I think he'll drool and feel envy when he sees my iPhone. And everyone moaned about the prices of iPods. I don't see that having kept it from becoming the truly dominant digital music device.

Me, I'd absolutely love to have an iPhone, though I'm always nervous about first-generation technology. I'm a managing editor and I do an entire 4-color, perfect-bound global monthly business magazine from my last-generation PowerBook G4, and it's never crashed once, no matter what I'm doing in Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, iTunes, Excel, and Word, with a multitabbed browser open. What crashes? World and Excel. Oh, and Quark. My previous home computer, a PC, crashed all the damn time. The Macs always crash thing is a pile of rubbish. Everyone editor in our office uses a Mac, and we all lay out pages, create print-ready PDFs, work with hi-res images, and so on. Our only problems come from incompetent IT staff when it comes to installing fonts, plug-ins, and other configuration/set-up screw-ups.

So, I'd say, Manjoo wasn't on an anit-Apple warpath, Apple computers rock, and the iPhone does indeed appear to be a revolutionary product. As always, Apple has put the user first, made design and function paramount, and has once again shown that while Jobs may not have been as savvy a businessman as Gates in the early days, he sure as hell has a lot more vision and creativity.