I’ve recently been taking a good, hard look at my disgust as Apple products, and decided to give the iPhone another chance. That is, of course, until I saw the screen resolution: 320×480. That, and the hard drive size: 4 or 8 GB. Now, I’m sorry Apple, but the only way you’re going to entice me to spend $500+ on a phone is by incorporating full iPod functionality - that means more than a few hours of video on the HD. And 320×480? My Zen Vision (over a year old) has a bigger screen with higher resolution (3.7in and 640×480).

Fact of the matter is, I like my portable media player more than my phone, so whatever new $600 iPod I get, it better be a lot better than my $300 Zen Vision. ‘Til then, Apple? Keep working on it.

But the point is your Zen doesn’t have calling capabilities, nor does it have a touch-screen, bluetooth, and wi-fi, all underpinned by OS X, along with an elegant, slim-form. There’s more going into that $600 tag besides the screen resolution itself. As for the screen, millions of people bought and watch movies on their current 2.5″ iPod screens, so a widescreen 3.5″ screen is still a step in the right direction.

As for memory — yeah, it’d be nice to have more, but if it’s a choice between 60GB hard-disk vs. 8GB flash-memory, I’ll go with the Flash every time. I have a Nano, and quite frankly, I have no problem swapping out songs as necessary when I need to — and as often as I drop that thing (and my current phone), solid state memory is a godsend.

I’m not going to get one right away, but I do think the iPhone is a pretty sweet product. And if the rumors are true that you won’t need a long-term commitment w/AT&T… extra sweet.

I guess it all just comes down in the end to which devices I want a “premium” version of. And since the one thing I’m willing to spend big bucks on at the moment is for a portable media center, the iPhone isn’t worth it for me at the moment.

Yeah, I understand that reasoning; if you don’t need a phone, then you’re obviously missing out on a big part of the toy. Personally, I’m waiting for either notebook/tablet screens to grow smaller, or for current portable media center screens to get larger. Add in 30GB of Flash memory and you’ve got a winner… but right now, I don’t think anyone’s hit the true sweet spot.