Yep. It's an another iPhone article, but do read on.

No doubt you will have heard about how amazing it is, and I am not denying that it is a beautiful device and wonderfully designed, but compared to what is on offer Australian market it's going to need a lot extra before the hoards will rush out to buy it.

For example, I have a fairly normal phone, on a regular  plan - it costs me about $60.00 a month with a ton of calls/messages and the phone handset is included in that price (ie no upfront fee) over 24 months.

For the tech-savvy age group (I'll say 16-30 years of age), almost everyone is turning towards 3G networks these days, 3 Mobile has been around for ages, and Telstra (Australias major telco) is marketing very hard to push people to it's own 3G network as well. If the iPhone was released in its current form (without 3G), then we will be taking a huge step backwards.

Right now, at this very moment I can stream live TV from various networks directly to my 3G phone for about $5.00 a month. It has an inbuilt FM radio, plays MP3's/WMA's (with full support for cover art, etc) and the headphones provided with the phone are far, far better than my iPod ones. It has a 2megapixel camera (which records video) and is capable of sending MMS - something which apple has left out of the iPhone. It also has a camera on the front for making video calls.

I can (and do) check emails, it works as a 3G modem with my laptop (via bluetooth or USB), the camera has a flash (which doubles as a torch) and it supports Java applications, so it's easily expandable. It supports Duo Pro cards for storage expandability (a 1GB card is supplied). The iPhone missed out on a majority of these features, and barely matches the others. To re-iterate, my phone is nothing special or new, and is representative of a "common" feature set on most phones here.

The iPhone offers probably one of the most breakthrough interfaces and design styles, but it lags behind on all other technology terribly. I probably wouldn't be in a huge "must have" hurry to upgrade if they were released as-is over here.

With the huge power hungry screen and featureset, I also have my doubts if the iPhone in its current generation will ever support 3G, which is probably why it is only an American release at the moment.

Also - Jeroen has a few interesting things to say about the iPhones touch screen user interface.