On July 11, the 3G iPhone is released in Australia, and Telstra has just revealed that they are going to carry it. My current phone (a low-to-mid-range Nokia by today’s standards) has been bugging out on me lately, so I think I’ll be getting a shiny new iPhone come late July. Why buy an iPhone?

Because if there’s one company in the world that would know how to design and implement a good mobile phone, it’s Apple. Consider the iPod:

At its core, it’s just a hard-drive with a headphone jack. So why did it go on to sell umpteen-million units? Because of the design behind it. Because of Apple’s vision. Because of the ingenuity of the iPod – that incredible combination of form and function. The combination of a well-thought-out interface, great front-end software and easy setup and maintenance is what made the iPod sell. Apple put money, time and effort into coming up with a good product that represented a substantial paradigm shift, and the result was millions of happy customers, and a sizable profit.

So as you can see, Apple have done it before – and by all accounts, they’ve done it again with the iPhone. If fairly well-trusted reviewers are anything to go by, the iPhone has done for mobile phones what the iPod did for portable media. I should stress that I’m talking about the original iPhone here in comparison to all of the other phones on the market. Whether or not the 3G iPhone is a substantial upgrade from the iPhone 1.0 remains to be seen, though initial whispers say that the majority of the problems in the original iPhone have been fixed up.

But maybe I’m jumping the gun here about my iPraise. It’s true, my opinion of Apple, Inc. has changed substantially since I read iWoz, the autobiography of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. It’s a great book by a very important and sometimes forgotten person in the industry, and well worth anyone’s time. He manages to talk tech without bogging the non-tech readers down with explanations of compilers and processors. The book is great, and totally opened my eyes to Apple. Before, I was in the headspace of “Apple v Microsoft”, and because I used Microsoft products, I assumed that because Microsoft “won”, Apple had to “lose”. Until I read this book, I didn’t consider Apple to be a serious option for anything more than cool-looking music players and funny advertisements. Now I’m in a different mindset – it’s not a win/lose situation. The market isn’t binary like that (though that doesn’t change the fact that those ads are really funny). Microsoft and Apple are just options – comparing the two is like comparing Apples and oranges.

With this new open outlook on Apple, I’m thinking seriously about an iPhone. The combination of their track record and my recent enlightenment means that I may come one step closer to being the guy at Starbucks writing on their trendy MacBook Air. Point me towards the Feist albums.