If you have used a Palm Treo with Windows Mobile 5 you are well familiar with one of Danté's seven levels of hell.  It is no wonder the iPhone is one of the most anticipated electronics devices.

Mobile phones are boring.  They're ugly, uninspired and bland.  Sure, you can get any "smart phone" to do all of the things the iPhone does, but they're not an Apple.  If you own an Apple product - iPod or computer - you know that they build their stuff right.

I got my Treo in spring of 2006 when my Motorola V710 decided it would start cutting off, dropping calls and picking up voicemail a couple of days after they were left. We had some good times together except for one big problem: Messaging.

I rely heavily on e-mail. Our support system is tied to e-mail. Because I consider service essential to my clients it is important that I can send and receive e-mail. There's just one problem: unless you use Microsoft Exchange it is difficult as hell send e-mail from the Treo. I won't get complex about it but, like most M$ products, the phone does not follow standards.

The Treo is a good phone -- it does a lot of things well. It just does not do any one thing really well. One thing is particularly bad at is being a phone. It's also scores a "C" on staying turned on, keeping connected to Verizon's signal, and remembering the number to call to retrieve voicemail (*86, by the way) just to name a few.

One thing the Treo does really well - several times a day - is require a "soft reset." That is when the phone freezes to the point that you have to remove the back cover and press a reset button with the stylus. Then you hope it will find the signal when it finally restarts.

I will hand it to Verizon -- at Bank of America Stadium during the Panthers/Cowgirls game when my first Treo fell off of my hip and got kicked -- completely accidentally -- and slid about 10 feet across the floor then crashed into the wall exploding into a million pieces, Verizon replaced it for $50. Awesome.

I'm going to miss Verizon until they can come up with:

• A "smart phone" that runs something besides Windows


• A phone that has full IMAP e-mail support


• A "rollover" plan (awesome, Cingular/AT&T, BTW)


• The iPhone

Many will argue that the iPhone is purely techno porn. I disagree.  While I could care less about having You Tube on it, (Was THAT the big secret? Big deal!) I care about having a stable phone OS, making and receiving calls, surfing the web with a REAL web browser and anything beyond that is an extra toy at the bottom of the cereal box.

But where I see the real innovation here is that Apple has prodiced a pocket-sized device that runs Mac OS X.  It's a Pocket Mac that's also a phone!!  Yes, it's beautiful.  It has pretty icons.  It has the REAL internet and REAL e-mail.  It has visual voicemail - a feature you will see more often over the next several years as other companies steal the idea.  But what I think is the iPhone's most powerful feature has been it's least discussed feature.

I read a review by someone who had a chance to try one out for the last month and they complained that the phone was receiving software updates daily.  And how is that a bad thing?  A company is selling a device that does not have the phone OS flash-ROMed onto a chip but gets its software updates over the air!

THAT, my friends, is what is genius about the iPhone.

See you after the 29th.