I thought I was far too cynical and tired of the whole PDA/Phone/PIMP/gadget thing to get enthused anymore, but I was wrong.

I don’t want to sound like an IRC-borne twelve-year-old tech-kiddie, but OMFG, I must MUST have one of these!!!
It’s a PDA that appears to be useable without a stylus (must find out how hard it is to enter text) and it’s a wifi web-browsing appliance backed by Apple. Either item alone would get my attention, without the phone, the camera, the promise of portable MacOSX, the ipod-ness and so on.

I even signed up to the ‘Oh Apple, please spam me about the iPhone’ thing on their terrible tease of a site.

On reflection, it’s a little amusing that this comes so hot on the heels of my last post all about PDAs. After all, the iPhone doesn’t actually meet a lot of my criteria, does it?

• Fits in my pocket. – Check.
• Uses a stylus. – Nope. You use your fingers. 🙂
• Runs PalmOS apps. – Nope, or at least probably not.
• Runs Pocket PC apps. – Nope, or at least probably not.
• Talks bluetooth to my other gadgets. – Semi-check. Bluetooth is there, but third-party interoperability may be a little on the thin side.
• Is stable as hell. – Who knows? It’s a new port of MacOSX to an unknown CPU!
• Will be properly supported by the manufacturer for the next three years. – This at least seems very likely.

Despite all of this, it still looks like a very close match to my ideal PDA/phone. I really, badly want to know when this is going to hit shelves in Australia.