iPhone commercials debut

As I was passively watching the Red Sox vs. Yankees baseball game tonight, I couldn't help but notice the new iPhone spots. You can see all three from here. It appears they've finally settled on June 29th as the launch date. I'm very interested to see what this does for AT&T (formerly Cingular) and to their competition.

Sprint Nextel has been advertising what appears to be their answer, the Samsung UpStage, for a few weeks now. I just read an article on this earlier that said they're hoping this doesn't get lost in the iPhone hype. At $149 for a 2-year contract, the price might be much easier to swallow for some when compared to the iPhone.

Verizon isn't saying anything about what they're doing to counter this. Last weekend I popped into a Verizon retail store to see if they had any new phones hit the shelves. They didn't. At least nothing new to compete with the iPhone.

When I asked the manager of the store what Verizon was going to do to try to counter the iPhone, he simply replied, "That's a very good question. They haven't said anything to us. But they never really do. We do have the Blackberry 8800 series coming tomorrow, which is a global phone though. And we have the Chocolate phone if you want a phone with a music player."

Wonderful, your plan to counter the iPhone is to offer a Blackberry that AT&T has had out for a while now or a phone that gets mixed reviews and is said not to live up to the original hype.

hat I find most interesting is that both Verizon and Sprint appear to be looking at the iPhone as more of an iPod with calling capabilities. Doen't this seem like the wrong way to look at it? Shouldn't they instead be seeing it more as a computer that fits in your pocket that happens to also make calls and play music? Isn't that what it really is? Or am I making it out to be something it's not? (Yes, I know that right now it's more of an "internet communications device" and it doesn't run Microsoft Office, etc., etc., but with all the web-based applications Google and others are coming out with, how far off is it from being a full-on computer?) Anyway...

So, what will all of this do? We'll just have to wait and see I guess. Personally, I'm going to wait a year or two and let Apple and AT&T work all the bugs out before I get one. Plus I just got a Samsung Blackjack that I'm very happy with. (My conversation with Verizon was the last straw. I jumped over to AT&T. Figured I might as well get on their service since that's where I'll be in a year or two anyway.)