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Counting Down To June For The iPhone

It's going to be a long wait until June. That's when Apple says it will release its newly announced iPhone. But it may be July or later before I actually get one (or two, since I assume my wife will want one). Given the universal praise I've been hearing for the device, I suspect they may be hard to get ahold of initially.

During Steve Jobs's keynote at Macworld, Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, said he would love to have an iPhone. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, "This product is going to be hot."

Clearly, Apple is onto something.

It's tempting to discount such praise since Apple, Google, and now Yahoo are all in business together. But even those with (a bit) less of a vested interest had nice things to say about the iPhone.

"The iPhone is really going to revolutionize the world as Steve described it," Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said following Jobs's keynote speech today. (Wozniak, wearing a bike helmet, had been cornered on his Segway scooter by reporters and Apple fans outside Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, and was answering questions.)

Wozniak had two regrets about the device: that it will come with 8 Gbytes of memory rather than 40 Gbytes and that it had no built-in GPS hardware.

"It's a really sweet device," Jonathan Hoopes, managing director of equity research at investment bank ThinkEquity Partners, told me during a phone interview earlier today. "I can't say enough cool things about it. I want one."

One thing I think is particularly cool is that iPhone has the potential to be a great gaming device, assuming game makers can figure out a way to use the touch screen for input. If Apple sells enough iPhones, game makers might even be enticed to create games specifically for the Apple platform. Sony PSP, look out (in 2008).

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