Technogasm.

Everyone in the world is now excited about the iPhone. I've seen footage of Steve Jobs showing off his latest gadget a couple of times now, and I have to weigh in with a cold shower of actual reality. I am glad at the moment that no one pays any damn attention to me, because otherwise I would have large men with apple-emblazoned lead pipes knocking at my door. I do not wish to be beaten by Mac zealots brandishing their third generation iPipes. But I feel that this must be said:

There is no part of the iPhone that wasn't done by Palm (or Handspring) more than two years ago.

I am not just talking hypothetically; my second cell phone ever was my Handspring Visor Deluxe. I remember trying desperately to find my way around Chicago by downloading, via my cell network, a Mapquest map of the Windy City. I was excited as hell to get my Palm Tungsten T5, two Christmases ago. And when I got my wireless network card for it, so much the better. And if I had had the money to throw around, I would have been on the Lifedrive like feces on a wall of the monkey cage.

To give props to Apple, I will say that they pulled it together in what seems to be a relatively seamless, efficient manner. And the "Cover Flow" application looks fantastic; if it weren't for the significant portion of my CDs for which Apple offers no artwork, I would be getting an inappropriate amount of happy from that. But really, let's look at the three things that Jobs bragged about with his new device:
1. Cell Phone: again, the VisorPhone worked well enough for me, and wasn't limited to just the one network. But it's not like Palm just took that lying down; they've been hawking the Treo for years.
2. iPod: 6 gigs of memory is quite a bit. Something Palm understood when they made their 6 gig Lifedrive. Which included a mono speaker, as well as a headphone jack. Ever see a speaker on an iPod?
3. Portable internet device: The Palm VII is now to PDAs what the brick phone of the late '80s is to current flip phones, but Palm has like eight years in the market now; they've done work in that time. I'm a little bitter that Apple, which until now has completely ignored this capability, will probably make as much money off of the iPhone each year as Palm did, as a whole company, during its entire lifespan. Damn upstart whippersnappers.

So that's life in the high-stakes world of useless crap. But hey, it's electrified, so it's really cool, and not at all geeky, right?