Steve Jobs brings these extremely high expectation on himself. He has hyped the iPhone as "awesome", has orchestrated the launch to the point where anything less than blowout sales and rave reviews will tarnish his golden touch, the Apple image and stock price.

It's now a question of whether the iPhone will become the tipping point in iPhonomics, the Apple-driven post-PC era. Steve Jobs expects to win with superior technology that he claims is 5 years ahead of anyone else.

Heck, I just got a new Pocket-PC-Phone (the 8125) which syncs my Outlook calendar to beep me on all my appointments. I can check email, browse the web, look up Google Maps, read Word and text documents, play with Excel files and view Powerpoint presentations. It has a bigger screen to show off my pictures and videos, so that my (less than a year old) iPodVideo is now just a paperweight. (Wannna buy it? Cheap).

So, now do I want to give up my Pocket PC for a $499 iPhone? Must I sign up for another 2-year contract? Does it take my current SIM-card (with all my stored telephone numbers), or must I enter all those numbers again? And what about all my Word and Excel and Powerpoint files? And hey, I've gotten used to my phone beeping me for my next appointment. Can I sync. my Outlook Calendar?

The hype surrounding the iPhone has been extraordinary. But I won't go to an AT&T store at midnight to wait in line to buy one. But my son Chris Pinto is buying one - he's always first to get new gadgets and besides his old cellphone is kaput. I'll wait till I touch and feel the iPhone, to play with that virtual keyboard, to see whether I can trust it to do the multifarious things I now expect from my pocket-pc-phone-GPS-MP3-player.

After all the hype, it'll be really interesting to see what happens with Apple and Steve Jobs' new creation. Got any Apple stock? Gonna buy? Or sell?

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