iAm aSucker.

Last week, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone. It still has Wi-Fi internet, so as long as you’re in a hotspot, you can browse and stuff.

I ordered it the day it was announced – $399 for 16GB (I sold my fifth-gen one on eBay, so don’t think that I just waste tons on iPods nonstop). They kept it with flash instead of the hard drive that I was hoping for. At first I was worried about it and considered going for the comparatively lame hard-drive model, but then I sorted my iTunes library by date last played, and found out that I’ve listened to like 10GB worth of music since about….May. So I went ahead and made the order thinking that I could keep the rest of my ~50GB collection on my laptop.

In the week after I pre-ordered the iPod Touch, I realized that there was little difference between the $399 iPod Touch and the $399 iPhone. (the Touch has 8GB more storage, the iPhone…. um, has a phone.)  I’d been planning on picking up a smartphone from Verizon in six months or so when they give me a discount, but I got down to thinking about saving more in the long run by just going with the iPhone.

So I did that. I bought myself an 8GB iPhone yesterday.  It lives up to all of the hype – it’s friggin’ awesome.

Most of all, I got it for the mobile internet- both WiFi (without having to lug my laptop) and over CingularAT&T’s painfully slow EDGE network. The $50 a month I was paying just for voice simply wasn’t worth it to me – and now I pay $60, and it includes unlimited data usage (Verizon is about $80 for the same thing).

So overall, it’s awesome, except for a couple of tiny details:

• E-mail not instant- it aggregates every 15 minutes. Yahoo does “push” e-mail to iPhone, so I might set up a dummy forwarder to the iPhone from my other e-mail accounts
• 8 gigs is 10% of my last iPod’s capacity. It is already full. And it’s painful.
• AT&T’s network coverage in Colorado isn’t as good as Verizon’s. This will make or break it for me as to whether or not I keep the iPhone or get a Treo or something through Verizon. I don’t talk a ton, but if it becomes too much of a hassle anytime in the next month, I’ll return the iPhone and get the phoneless Touch instead.

Chances are 80% that I’ll keep it. We’ll see.