Chris: Well I found it easy to justify the iPhone (and I am sure I'll fall into the minority here), I had never owned any iPod so to me I was getting an update to my phone which had decided that the digitizer was an optional feature as well as a brand new iPod with video.

If I recall, I paid close to $400 for my subsidized Treo 650 when it came out (and that's not including almost three years inflation). That's why price isn't mentioned as highly, all of these gadgets are expensive on day one. If I take the combined cost of an original 650 and an 8GB iPod Nano - wow I wind up paying $649 (my Treo required ATT as well so those costs are moot, in fact since I moved from the unlimited data plan for the Treo, I am actually saving $20/month).

Now I think we are getting slightly off topic but I think that everyone agrees that iPhone needs apps.

Ben: Except for probably the most important, 320x480 multi-touch. Even though Palm has had an SDK available for years (and I have dabbled developing with CodeWarrior on my Palm III) the browsers, media players, and email clients have been weak compared to the introductory iPhone offering (though iPhone's MobileMail can definitely be improved!). Don't get me wrong, I definitely want to see 3rd party development but I don't see going back to Palm for a very very long time.

I guess one other thing, being on AT&T already for a number of years it was no problem to jump to an iPhone but people used to 3G goodness have a legitimate complaint. Again patience.

I am using my iPhone day to day after having a Treo 650 from the day the 650 came out. While probably less reliant on mobile technology than Julie I have to agree that syncing Notes is basic and sorely missing (I'll guess to be addresses when Leopard comes out which is fine for us OS X users but what about Windows?) as well as some level of 3rd party application support. While I don't need 1000s of applications I am really missing two:

SplashID TuSSH

Also having general access to the file system and USB mounting would be nice. And before anyone suggests the hacks, yes I have thoroughly gone through the phone and have SSH, SFTP and Apache running on it but that isn't the same from a usability perspective.

None of the above however has made me disappointed in my iPhone purchase. It is leaps and bounds better than my Treo 650 for the things I mostly use it for, web, email, and audio/video media (TCPMP/Core Media doesn't even come close to iTunes on iPhone). I also think (hope?) that patience will be rewarded over the next few months with the iPhone getting 3rd party support.

Over and out.

I'll be the iPhone zealot for the moment and say I can't ever imagine going back to my Treo (ok it was 650 but subsequent Treos never looked worth the upgrade). I had the time to follow the early instructions and be giddy with Terminal but I really think the iPhone hacking effort is phenomenal and I'd really be curious to know what your must have apps for it would be?

I am waiting for a SplashID clone and syncing other bits of data but have been really impressed by the SummerBoard and Installer.app efforts so far.

Just yesterday I needed to shell into a server, and run some spur of the moment applications from the health club. No laptop around but couldn't have been easier (and certainly no more difficult than on the 650 of old - do those Treos have wifi yet?!).

Yes I can go into complaints about A2DP, a real SDK and why not a bluetooth keyboard profile - but I can also wait it out since my 85% today is so much more than before.

Good luck on being restless :-) I am happy (for today).

I think the easiest and quickest (and cheapest) are Handbrake and VisualHub. I've used VisualHub for work and play and it does a fantastic job converting across a ton of formats. If I'm correct it is just a streamlined UI for ffmpegx and whatever other codecs it drops in. Just the day before I needed to move some video to my iPhone and 1,2,3 it is done converting and adding into iTunes.