Despite my losing battle with a summer cold — what’s with those, anyway — I’ll be traveling to D.C. at dark-thirty on Wednesday and will be there a couple of days. Schedule is pretty jammed, so I don’t know when/if I’ll be blogging.

[Synopsis of the following post: The embargo for the "first reviews" of the iPhone dropped tonight. If you boil them all down, here's what they all say: "The cellular broadband it uses is painfully slow, but you'll appreciate having all that extra time to ponder how envious your friends are that you own the coolest gizmo ever.]

In something akin to election night, I found myself tuning into the web tonight to see if the “early reviews” were trickling in. Sure enough, the two bell-weather precincts have reported and it looks like the iPhone will carry all 50 states. Or, to chase another analogy rabbit, if this were a Broadway opening, those big blub signs outside the theatre would have been rushed into production.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The New York Time’s David Pogue have issued-forth the two most highly-hyped reviews of the most highly-hyped gizmo I can recall. I’m sure those in the tech-punditry who have Mossberg-envy since reading the recent New Yorker profile that says he makes $1 million a year –will claim Mossberg is a dupe of Apple. (For example, in what was surely a joke, surely, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, who didn’t receive a review iPhone, suggests Pogue and Mossberg gave positive reviews to ensure “they will continue to receive new Apple gadgets in the future.” Again, that surely was a joke.) However, no matter what is said in the tech press and blogosphere, nothing will change the fact that every CEO in America will be reading one of these reviews tomorrow morning. Gadget envy will set in and that whole “IT won’t support the iPhone” issue will be a distant memory.

The two pretty-much deliver on what every one has predicted: AT&T’s EDGE network sucks. They both agree, emphatically. Pogue even gives some sobering examples to display how sloooowwww it is:

“The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo, two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.”

Mossberg’s biggest surprise — and, frankly, this is where he’s at his best — is dismissing the “there’s no keyboard” protests as a “non-issue.” Pogue agrees and says the leaflet accompanying the phone says “trust the keyboard.” Despite the “new-age” sound of the instructions, it’s true, he says.

Quote from Mossberg:

“The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

On the Mossberg video (embedded), he admits that after the first three days of using the keyboard, he was ready to throw it away — that it took him a full five days before having the breakthrough that caused him to drop his skepticism. I say, this is where Walt Mossberg is at his best because he’s one of the few reviewers I’ve read over the years who spend weeks testing products before issuing reviews. If you test something at your desk for an hour and issue a review — something you’ll be reading a lot of on Friday night and Saturday morning — you miss the nuances of performance that can only be noticed after a couple of weeks.

In my review of the reviews, I’m going to give the nod to Pogue as he threw in a Dizzy Dean quote, something one rarely, if ever, hears in a tech/gadget review:

“But even in version 1.0, the iPhone is still the most sophisticated, outlook-changing piece of electronics to come along in years. It does so many things so well, and so pleasurably, that you tend to forgive its foibles. In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t bragging if you done it.”

That’s what reviews need: More Dizzy Dean quotes.

Later, more reviews:

Later: When I started out earlier this evening, I thought I’d compare and contrast the reviews. However, they all seem to be written by the same person. Everyone loves the same things, hates the same things, and says the same things. 1. Edge sucks 2. Having one will bring you eternal joy.

Khoi Vinh writes about the limits of his stupidity, which just-about (except for the R.E.M. tickets) sums up my thoughts on when I’ll get an iPhone:

“I’m cringing at the idea of queuing up outside the Apple Store to get my hands on one. That’s about where I draw the line, I think. Standing in line too easily dredges up memories of long spells in line at my local shopping mall trying to get decent tickets to see R.E.M. or some such act when I was sixteen — I guess I’m glad I experienced that kind of extravagant stupidity once, but I’m not about to do it again. Ever. The fact that I’m more or less mentally committed to buying an iPhone at the first reasonable opportunity — regardless of what potentially scathing reviews its touch-based keyboard will undoubtedly receive — is enough, I think. I’m not going to physically plant myself on a sidewalk through heat, rain or multiple mealtimes just for bragging rights. It’s just too much; this personal investment in having an iPhone of my own by Saturday isn’t that important to me. On the other hand, if you have a surefire plan to share queuing duties, let me know.

The 16-year-old volunteered to camp out for me — if I’d get him one. Forget it, I said.

Actually, having been burned in similar ways, I’m a bit like Eric Rice, who says that despite already having AT&T phone service, he thinks EDGE is awful for wireless internet. He also knows of Apple’s consistent record in not getting the kinks out of the first batch of new products. Been there, done that, many times. Eric is going to wait a while.

I will probably order an iPhone online and get it when I get it. Intuitively (I won’t know until I try it), I still think the least impressive thing about the iPhone is that it’s a phone. As Apple is sure to come out soon with an upgrade of the iPod that has all the features of the iPhone, without the phone, I would wait for that if I weren’t so programmed by Steve Jobs to run purchase everything he tells me to. What do I mean, “all the features, except the phone”? Well, watch all those iPhone ads and you’ll notice something. They’re about all the cool stuff you can do if you have an iPod with wifi and accelerometer features — and then at the end, there’s a throw-away line that goes something like, “and, oh yeah, it’s a phone.” Well, frankly, I already have a phone. It’s all that other cool stuff I want.

That said, I reserve the right to be wrong — as I often am when it comes to Apple products. For example, I thought the iPod Shuffle was ridiculous when it first came out because, at the time, a nano cost just a little more and had many times the features and memory. So much for my theories.

Here’s some advice to those who want to upgrade to a newer iPod, cheap. Now is the time to look on eBay for some really nice, used ones — recent models with all the video bells and storage whistles. The early-adopter wave that will be purchasing iPhones all own nice iPods, already — and many will be selling their last early-wave purchases on eBay to help defray the costs of purchasing the new iPhone. The supply will be heavy for the next few weeks, so there will be some great deals. Happy shopping.

I learned that trick from observing the 16-year-old sell old videogame platforms to help fund the purchase of new ones.

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