The iPhone in many ways reminds me of the Guess brand of jeans of the late 1980s: all flash, no substance. Back in those days (in the 1980s), I wore Levi's jeans because they did their job which was to (oddly enough) be a pair of durable blue jeans, fit well, and cost a fair price. But, there was another brand of jeans at the time called Guess jeans, about twice the price of Levi's and didn't last as long and weren't as comfortable. Well, people loooooved Guess jeans, wanted to be seen wearing Guess jeans, wore them with the label proudly displayed, and didn't really care that they weren't a good pair of jeans.

My college roommate called up his parents and whined at them to buy him new pairs of Guess jeans, because everybody wore them. "But, dad, I need to have Guess jeans! You don't get it! All the popular people wear them!"

See:

Dr. Mac: iPhone not really a good phone

Here's a quote:

 That all changed Saturday afternoon 
 when my 1-day old iPhone 3G had a 
 catastrophic failure and froze at 
 the Apple startup screen.  I tried 
 every trick in the book to no avail 
 before swallowing my pride and 
 heading to my local Apple Store at 
 The Domain in Austin, TX.

And, see: BusinessWeek: iPhone not really a good phone

Here's another quote:

 Complaints over dropped calls and 
 choppy Web connections on Apple's 
 iPhone 3G have sparked a wave of 
 debate in the blogosphere over the 
 root cause of the problems.  Two 
 well-placed sources tell 
 BusinessWeek.com the glitches are 
 related to a chip inside Apple's 
 music-playing cell phone.

"But, it's an iPhone! Everybody's got one! I look soooo coooool because I have one."

Gag me with a spoon (popular quote from the 1980s). I'll just keep wearing my Levi's jeans and use my Java ME cell phone (which works, by the way). I'll leave the iPhone for the tragically hip and the hopelessly carrier-signal-less people of the world. :-)

Hinkmond