My poker buddy Seiji bought an iPhone an hour after I bought mine on June 29th. But instead of kibitzing for 13 hours in line with a couple of thousand other nincompoops at Apple's Fifth Avenue showcase store in Manhattan, he merely strolled into the Soho store at 7 p.m., walked up to the counter and bought one. Silly me. Silly everyone.

Our subsequent usage experiences similarly differ. After besting my Jacks full with four Aces at one of our recent weekly Texas Hold 'Em soirees, he noted that having an iPhone is "like having a new girlfriend. I can't keep my hands off of it."

My own iPhone honeymoon hasn't been quite as rapturous as Seiji's. This is not to say I don't love my iPhone. But my feelings are more akin to a mature marriage than courting lust. You recognize all your beloved's flaws and you're often tempted by newer models. But at the end of the day, you realize you chose the best model after all.

But the advanced capabilities new iPod Touch magnify the iPhone's shortcomings and have triggered a semi-radical change of heart. When someone asks me "Should I buy an iPhone?" even at the seemingly bargain price of $399, I say "No." Here's why.

Apple's new iPod Touch is not the new iPod. It's a preview of iPhone 2.0. All that separates the iPod Touch from an iPhone is cell-phone connectivity, which continues to be iPhone's primary flaw.

AT&T's EDGE network is simply not up to the task of delivering a satisfactory Web-browsing experience, and that "more bars in more places" is, in my experience, bunk. I spend the bulk of my time testing cell phones, and where the iPhone can't get a signal, Verizon and Sprint cells usually do. AT&T is currently in the process of doubling the data throughput of its cell towers, but the network's overall inconsistency drives me crazy.

But no matter how fast AT&T makes EDGE, it's still nowhere near a fast as AT&T's new, but still not universally available, broadband HSDPA network.

Steve Jobs' reason for not endowing iPhone with HSDPA capabilities is well known — HSDPA access would devour battery life, rendering the iPhone useless in short order. Instead, iPhone has an EDGE chip and the longest life of any multimedia cell phone for most of its applications. At least in theory.

A week after he bought his iPhone, Seiji came to the poker game asking if I had a spare iPod cable. His iPhone was almost out of juice. The problem is that Seiji was right — you can't keep your hands, or, more precisely, your fingers, off of it. Apple made the iPhone too damned fun to use. Between Web surfing, listening to music, watching videos you've downloaded or off YouTube, zooming in on your house and your friends' houses on the map function, reading and answering your email — the list goes on — within a couple of hours, your iPhone battery is wheezing. Oddly, the iPod Touch is a step backwards where battery life is concerned; it offers 2 fewer hours for both music and video playback compared to iPhone.

Like the battery, Jobs also underestimated memory needs on the iPhone — 8 GB for a nano is plenty of room for a normal music collection, but an iPhone has a 3.5-inch widescreen, encouraging you to carry lots of fat video files. I always end up having to decide what to sync: music or video. iPod Touch's 16 GB sounds more reasonable.

My biggest complaint about iPhone is the stupid recessed headphone jack. Apple's included earbuds are uncomfortable, to say the least, and are not an option. I can't use my chosen headphones without an adapter, and my headphones don't have an inline microphone (which you need to take calls). Instead I keep my custom Ultimate Ears UE5c in my ears and hold the iPhone up to my mouth like a microphone when a call comes in, which looks even geekier than holding an inline mic on a wire closer to your mouth.

Although I've heard promises from headphone makers such as Shure, Etymotic, Sennheiser and Ultimate Ears, none has yet produced audiophile iPhone-sized earbuds with in-line mic and music transport controls (Altec Lansing and V-Moda have iPhone earbuds with the necessary in-line functions, but I haven't sampled them yet). It is unclear from Jobs' presentation yesterday if the new iPod Touch continues this recessed-headphone-jack idiocy.

As I noted in my original iPhone review, with all of these and other complaints, iPhone is still the Tiger Woods of multimedia cell phones. Apple's arguable iPhone overreaching is still head and shoulders beyond anyone's successful efforts. No other cell phone is an iPod. No other phone has iPhone's memory. No other phone has such a large and beautiful screen. Multi-touch may make buttons as anachronistic as phone dials. And have you noticed that iPhone's interface doesn't use any pulldown menus? This could be an even greater interface breakthrough than multi-touch.

With its Wi-Fi iTunes connectivity and 16-GB capacity, the iPod Touch is an iPhone without a phone. And iPhone 2.0 will be an iPod Touch with HSDPA capabilities. When that happens — I hope early next year — that's when I'll recommend others to go on their own iPhone honeymoon.
— Stewart Wolpin

Stewart Wolpin has been writing about technology for more than 20 years for such publications as Playboy, CNET, Consumers Digest and American Heritage of Invention and Technology. He's also a Mets season ticket holder and has played poker every Thursday night for the last 22 years.