While I credit the "functionality" offered here (competition is good) this thing is a visual carbon copy of Apples coming product. I would expect Apple to quickly stomp on this and other look-a-likes.

this is the ultimate flattery. Seriously though, can anyone come up with something that's in any way original? It even has aqua like mac OS, although I guess you could say that they got it from "veesta" (why can no one pronounce that word correctly?). And they got that from OS X, so there's still nothing new.

Sad and annoying.

I'm thrilled to see all these new competitors come out of the woodwork (especially since apparently the iPhone didn't change anyone's business plans). It will only raise the tide for consumers, pressuring companies (including Apple) to continue to innovate.

I bet Apple makes some unexpected announcements to their phone that they withheld at the launch.

I'm assuming there will be some problems with patent issues... Doesn't apple have 50+ patents for this phone alone?

I think this shows another reason why it was strategically a good idea to announce the iPhone when Apple did: from now on, every touch-screen phone is seen as an iPhone wannabe, even though the other makers have been working on their respective products for months or years as well. It's amazing how Apple can set the standard with a product that hasn't even shipped yet.

I thought it was 150ish patents.

My guess is that companies are trying to put these products out asap to give themselves more legitimacy when the lawsuits start coming. They saw the success of the iPod which simply has not be duplicated in large part b/c of Apple's design. The iPhone's UI if a breakthrough, yes, I know there are lots of folks screaming such and such company was doing this since the dawn of time, but like the iPod, it took Apple to make digital music in to a real music medium. Apple hit the nail on the head, to technology for these things is and has been out there, but the UIs have sucked. However, unlike the iPod, where a lot of people just chuckled at the the little computer company they though was on it's way out, now days when Apple does something the tech industry takes notice. I have to wonder it Apple was prepared for this level of duplication, I mean, the mobile phone industry is a completely different animal. Oh, and it light of all this, Apple needs to grow up and either negotiate with Cisco over the iPhone name, or come up with another name. Apple might have a good argument that it's a different animal (might not too), but it's a legal argument only, I think measured against common sense if falls apart. After all, this copycat phone runs windows software, not OS X, so it's different, right? Of course not.

Every reviewer that had spent 15 minutes holding and touching iPhone has said that the beauty of the device is in its OS and UI. The smoothness of animation, the multi-touch interface (pinching, sliding, squeezing) are the things that cannot be duplicated. Apple patented the h*** out of these and will vigorously guard those. Form factor (size, shape) won't matter much. After all, Zune has more-or-less similar shape, size and look (loosely speaking) as iPod.

Apple is still the most important company in technology, the one driving innovation. The iPhone supports this, look how many companies are rushing to market with much better phones then we've ever seen before, just on the announcement of an Apple product!

From MWSF2007, Steve Jobs' Keynote . . . :

10:44am - We've been pushing the state of the art in every facet of this design. We've got the multi-touch screen, miniaturization, OS X in a mobile device, precision enclosures, three advanced sensors, desktop class applications, and the widescreen video iPod. We filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them."