iphone spam'alanche

I'm sure, like me, if you are on-line and in Australia you will have been the unwilling recipient of an avalanche of  hype, (ie expensive spam) about the release of the 3G iphone here . And if you can't wait till friday, apparently optus will start selling phones on midnight thursday (ok it is technically friday but much earlier).
However there is one very important thing the iphone hype forgets to mention, like telstra's qriuos hype before it. In Australia mobile phone plans come with ridiculously highly priced and low quoted data rates (so check out the bad news before you get excited) and I totally agree with Stephen Collins, the first telco to offer decent data rates "will own the market"
Iphone could be also be the watershed for digital photography, tens of thousands of photos are already being uploaded each day to flickr from Iphones. The camera specs are nothing flash but as any good photographer knows 90% of the picture quality comes from how the camera user "sees" the picture, not the quality of the camera. Much of what is being photographed and posted is very ordinary, but now there are cameras in the hands of almost eveyone everywhere recording life and things as never before.
Finally if you have 30minutes (& the bandwidth to waste) you can get a full video tour of the 3G iPhone direct from Bob Borches, senior director of Apple to watch online or download to your ipod (or your iphone, ok you haven't got one yet I forgot).