I’m astonished to find that the pre-iPhone hype is so strong that I want one. I’m generally pretty resistant to early-adopter hype. I’m not exactly gadget-shy, but I tend to hang out on the leading edge of the mainstream. It took me two or three years to buy an iPod, a Tivo, or a cell phone. My current phone remains very primitive. There are camera phones with better resolution than my ancient digital camera. I gave up on Palms after losing one and then wearing out a second one. I’m pretty shy of carrying portable gear at all, actually, after being pickpocketed out of one Palm and one digicam. And the iPhone is not exactly cheap, particularly when you consider the AT&T factor: I’m guessing that the iPhone data plan is not going to be the world’s best value. They are going to turn the first customers upside down and shake the change from their pockets.

But. Still. The commercials are truly stunning. Moreover, there are rumors that Apple is going to open up the API after all. If this is true, then holding back that announcement until this month is yet another brilliant Steve Jobs marketing move. Nobody at the World Wide Developers Conference will even care that the next Mac OS is running late. They will all be dreaming happily of the killer iPhone app that they’re gonna write. I haven’t tried to write a Mac app since the mid 1990s and even I am salivating at the possibilities.

The problem is that it’s hard not to look at the iPhone and see the computing device of the future. Cell phones are already the device of the hour, as I would know if my own cell phone and its plan weren’t so crappy. (Of course, this is the USA, so it’s not as if I have a lot of non-crappy choices.) Today I heard that most Twitter users access the service by phone. That thought never even occurred to me, hopeless dinosaur that I am. Every time I send a text message with my phone I have dark visions of my monthly bill secretly increasing by a dollar. I need to join the 21st century and get more familiar with the charms of platforms like the iPhone. By, say, buying one. For educational purposes. Yes. Standing in line at an AT&T store at midnight clutching $500 for… educational purposes.