iPhone.

"We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country," write Walter S Mossberg and Katherine Boehret. "Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer."

David Pogue reviews the iPhone, too, and finds it "amazing," but of course, "not perfect." Also in the New York Times, Katie Hafner talks with Apple watchers like Jeremy Horwitz, the editor in chief of iLounge: "Ask yourself how many companies can announce a product six months in advance and not just sustain public interest but even build the frenzy. It's staggering to me."

So what's it to cinephiles? For New City Chicago, Ray Pride has a few thoughts: "While much ink's been spent on the changes that no one can predict in the weeks and months to come in the movie industry, less has been written about how exhibition - from the multiplex to the rare, preserved movie palace - can survive and subsist in a world of broadband Internet and handheld devices with wireless connections and downloads, legal and not. Is it worth building bricks and mortar anymore?"

Update, 6/29: "Whatever else it does, the iPhone does bring a little 3-dimensional, visual transparency to technologies that have flattened out as they have become familiar," editorializes the New York Times. "It creates the illusion of looking into it rather than at it, as if you were peering into the depths of a clear electronic pond. It is also a multifunctional device that illustrates its multifunctionality - revealing and demonstrating the transformations it undergoes as it changes jobs. This is perhaps the iPhone's cleverest trick: dramatizing its cleverness for the user."

Updates, 7/1: "When I go back to using my Macbook Pro, I want to fling stuff around the screen like on the iPhone. It's an addictive way to interface with information." Jason Kottke reviews his new "amazing device... After fiddling with it for an hour, I know how to work the iPhone better than the Nokia I had for the past 2 years, even though the Nokia has far less capabilities.... Wasn't it only a year or two ago that everyone was oohing and aahing over Jeff Han's touchscreen demos? And now there's a mass-produced device that does similar stuff that fits it your pocket. We're living in the future, folks... the iPhone is the hovercar we've all been waiting for."

Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing: "It lives up to the hype. All the rules just changed."

Mike Curtis is all over it.

And: The iPhone Blog.

Online viewing tip. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay watches magician Marco Tempest demonstrate a few unadvertised features.

Update, 7/5: "[T]onight I'm leaving for Munich, and I would ordinarily want to bring along my iPod (for the plane and visits to the hotel gym), my cellphone (for brief, exorbitantly expensive calls home), and my laptop (allegedly for writing, mainly for checking e-mail and retrieving contact information)," notes Alex Ross. "This time I'm bringing only the iPhone, loaded up with my address book from Abramovich to Zalewski, itineraries for the Munich Opera Festival, representative works of Unsuk Chin and Wolfgang Rihm, favorite Dylan and Radiohead playlists, the Furtwängler Tristan und Isolde, two episodes of the show Friday Night Lights, and, yes, Chinatown."

Posted by dwhudson at June 27, 2007 11:46 AM