No doubt about it, Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch continue that company’s record of high class industrial design.  But if Steve Jobs’s taste and focus make for great-looking consumer products, his tightly-integrated hardware/DRM/software business model is more a throwback to the great (and sometimes unfairly labeled) “robber baron” industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Ironically, this business style is about as far from the culture of the Web as any company active in this space today.  I hope Apple’s design sense goes on forever, but the days for its business model are numbered.

Check it out, fanboys and fangirls.

I poked and prodded one of the units, but in some ways, the first moments of touching it were almost anti-climactic. I’ve been immersed so deeply in iPhone news, comment and rumor that I felt like I knew everything about it already. Of course, I don’t.

Five minutes of fondling the demo model seemed long enough to prove that I wasn’t on a tear to have one of them, so I walked over to a rep with a handheld device and bought one.

The activation was disappointing; Apple’s part worked perfectly, at least for me, but AT&T told me to wait for activation. Having read that it could take up to 6 hours, I went to bed. Activation was finished by the time I woke up this morning, so I’ve been an iPhone user for all of 2 hours.

It’s brilliant; it’s beautiful; it’s a work of art; it works like no other phone I’ve owned. There, that’s done. I hate the EDGE network, but I knew I would; it’s also faster than I expected, probably the result of Project Finer EDGE this week. The keyboard is another big surprise. It’s really responsive to one or two fingers, and within about 20 minutes I was typing with two thumbs with few errors, all of which were corrected by predictive text.
I’m sure that as I use it, I’ll find things I don’t like. Lack of copy and paste will be supremely annoying; I can’t put all 60 GB of my music on it (not sure why that bugs me); I want an iChat program, etc. But for everything I’ve found so far that I don’t like, there are one or two things that are truly captivating.

The only truly captivating thing about my Treo 700p when I pulled it out of the box was how often it crashed. And now the captivating thing about my Treo 700p is how completely stupid it looks. Compared to the iPhone, it looks like a block of wood.

I wanted to enter the star chamber and declare that I wouldn’t buy until iPhone v2 – you know, the version where Apple finally corrects the horrendous mistakes of version one. But when I asked myself what phone I wanted to own between now and then, I decided I’d just try to limp along with the first model.

UPDATE: iPhone accessory of the day: the wooden iPhone case.

1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email. 

2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production. 

3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.

The name? That’s from Doc Searls.