Will you let them win, my friends? Or will you strike a blow for freedom by hooking me up with this shiny piece of status-symbol crap that I don’t really need? The world’s greatest boss seems strangely unmoved by my appeal on this point. Perhaps she too, like so much of America, has gone soft on the jihad?

I awoke in a sweat this morning wondering, “Is the iPhone the Messiah?” As it turns out, no — Barack Obama is, as even his own wife now apparently acknowledges by referring to him as “The Answer.” Besides, the Messiah is a perfect being and the iPhone, for all its wonders, has flaws. Quite a few, in fact. No copy/paste function for e-mail? We’ll have to wait for 2.0, I guess.

The embargo on reviewers was finally lifted yesterday. Newsweek captures the general sentiment:

It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding. The iPhone is the rare convergence device where things actually converge.

The Times did them one better with its own review, busting out the web video to mark the occasion. The whimsy of the masturbation allusion is exceeded only by its subtlety.

Update: For the benefit of any Democrats reading, that first paragraph up top was an appeal to emotion designed at getting me something I want. Just FYI.