Response to Ars Technica "Nine Things Wrong" with iPhone

This is a very good list of perceived shortcomings and criticisms, and responding to it pretty much covers all my thoughts, so here goes, point by point:

1. Cost: Yes, the price point is high, and of course it will come down in a year. But remember that this is more than a phone - it's a phone/ipod/PDA rolled into one. Not that this doesn't exist elsewhere, but as with the iPod, it doesn't exist in an Apple-designed package, and in this case it rolls in one of the most successful consumer gadgets ever, the iPod itself. If I'm in the market for a new iPod and the iPhone is available, I'm interested in replacing 2-3 gadgets with one. 8 GB is a bit smaller than I'd want, though. Hope those flash prices come down quick-like.
   
2. Cingular-only: Deal-breaker for me at the moment, and probably for lots. I've got a year left in my Verizon/RAZR contract and I'm not willing to pay via olfactory bulb to get out of it. I live in hope that the phone will eventually be with multiple carriers, Verizon in particular. That said, there may be a huge rush to get these when they're available, and Cingular had better be ready. Not a bad problem to plan for...
   
3. No 3G: An iPhone 1.0 issue, and reason enough to wait for 1.5 or 2.0. Any phone that touts such cool apps like Safari and Google McGuffins needs high-bandwidth capabilities beyond Wi-Fi.
4. No WiFi sync to iTunes: See above. Most likely coming in 2.0 or with a software update. I don't see why not...
5. No over-the-air iTunes downloads: I agree with Ars - coming when 3G is added. It's the kind of "it just works" feature Apple would make a priority.
   
6. (skipping 6, too stupid)
7. Battery life: I wonder what happened to Kevin Rose's "leak" about separate batteries, one for music and one for phone?? Definitely an issue with a screen this big, and the kind of spec Apple will reluctantly revise in real-world usage scenarios. I'm guessing they're pulling out the big techie guns to figure out ways to minimize power usage, like the proximity sensor turning off the screen.
8. No Exchange/Office support: Since when is this supposed to be a business phone? I heard no mention of that. Apple's first market is (almost) always consumers, and while smartphones are obviously targeted at businesses, the OS X core of this phone that they were so careful to mention indicates that they want to open it up eventually to third-party developers, much like widget development. As Ars notes, this could be where Exchange/Office compatibility comes in, but I'm not sure Apple is that concerned about it. iPods don't play well with others, and look how poorly they've sold...
9. Not extensible: It will be. Oh, it will be. Why else would they take such care to note that it runs OS X? They could easily have kept that under their hats, never sharing the proprietary UI layer or kernel APIs or whatnot, but I don't think that's where this is headed. Remember that this is a 6-month pre-release announcement - many more details to follow in the months and years ahead.

I'd like to add that there's no way this widescreen, multi-touch format isn't going to find its way into the next-gen iPods as well. Macworld's post-keynote podcast said that they wouldn't be surprised to see these announced before the iPhone hits the market, and I tend to agree. Awesome.