To a lot of people I guess fashion is a shorthand for some vast personal philosophy. Instead of spending years to figure out what you personally believe in, you buy a Macintosh and suddenly you have defined your world view.

I suppose in some ways the iPhone could be seen as a “subversive” change. Cell phones today are something you get for (almost) free when you sign up with a large, monolithic service provider like AT&T or Telus. Service providers then castrate the phones as they see fit, removing or crippling features in order to funnel users to their high-priced services and avoid capabilities the service provider doesn’t want to support. Generally, if you change your service contract or move to a new provider, you get a new/different phone.

The way I understand it, Apple specifically requires that the phone be sold on its own, for full price, not as part of any service package. Features can be neither added nor removed by the service provider. Fundamentally, they want the phone to be *your* phone, and the cellular service is something you can pick and choose based on your momentary whim. The providers will be required to support the features the iPhone has, not the other way around. This difference (phone as a service contract adjunct versus service contract as a phone adjunct) is probably the biggest “uniqueness” of the iPhone.

But the phone itself seems to me to be yet another one of these “its a camera! Its a music player! Its a personal email and web browser! Oh, yeah, and it sorta does phone calls, but not very well” gadgets. I don’t see anything about it that really makes me think it is worth getting even slightly excited about.