i’ve read a lot of opinions about the iPhone, gravitating between blindly praising such a revolutionary product (it cures cancer!) and categorically saying it’ll suck due to some uber-specific design decisions.

my only beef with the iPhone is the same one as Jason Fried’s. you lose the “touch factor” when you move the entire interface to a flat screen. it’s the same issue with XDAs and the like: you can only control your phone without looking at it if it actually has buttons that you can feel your way around.

now, that in itself is not going to stop me from getting one of these just as soon as i can. it’s just too interesting a device to pass up.

regarding your concerns over sms, don’t forget that this machine runs OSX, so even if the text-input area didn’t expand dynamically (it normally would), you could always just install a different app to handle your SMS conversations. (hell, you could probably even code one yourself, in Ruby/Python/Perl or any other language that OSX interprets right out-of-the-box.)

this is really what i’m looking forward to actually, the ability to easily hack the crap out of your phone. even small things like Automator scripts will go a long way towards making the mobile experience a hell of a lot easier.