Its a cool phone, actually got to touch and play with one today for 15 secs. But, in my opinion not worth the price. There are no discounts at all, at least according to the person I spoke with today.
It is $500 for the 4 gig and $600 for the 8gig plus a $55-100 / month contract depending on minutes. It requires a data plan and is sim locked to only AT&T. You have to sign up for a 2 year contract.
Also, no removable battery. Advertised battery life is 8 hours of talk time and 250 hours of standby, but realistically normal use means having to charge it up at least once a day and heavy use will require multiple charges throughout the day. Users will have to tell me if that is true or not.
Web browsing is cool on it, best browser on a phone for sure. Video is great, audio is great.
But, you can’t download music to it directly, you have to sync it with your computer. In fact you have to install iTunes to even activate the phone.
You can’t install 3rd party applications on it, but there will be a lot of web based iPhone specific mini-apps for it.
It is really thin, but wide and larger then I expected. It is very smooth and my fingerprints were all over it quickly.
My final opinion on it is that I’d wait for the next version. It is a cool phone / handheld computer, but the limitations and price just don’t warrant a purchase. Plus being locked into AT&T for 2 years and costing almost $2500 over that period, there are much cheaper options to tide you over till the iPhone 2.0 comes out (at Apple’s pace, heck that could be by Christmas).