It erks me. It really does. When a person of some popularity makes a fool of himself by citing wrong facts and comparing products in different economies, it just pisses me off. One of the Sunday Times Magazine's tech columnists (if you can even call him that) recently wrote about the iPhone and it's launch here in South Africa. Sure, his column is about technology from a novices point of view, but that just makes it worse. By not getting his facts straight, he actually might be influencing his readers. In his latest column he went on about the launch price of the iPhone and how he thinks it's not worth it in this country. He also compares it to US pricing. Does he actually know that it's not sold unlocked and on prepaid in the US and that you can actually only buy it on contract? Nooo. He does not. Let alone the US economy and population is literally 100x bigger than ours. If you compare the phone feature for feature with other phones in it's class (wait, are there any that come close?) it's a no brainer. You would (and should) choose the iPhone over other similiar priced phones. Purely because it is the future. It sets the bar. It's changing the way mobile phone companies think and work. No other phone company even thought about creating a device as intelligent and robust as the iPhone. No other mobile platform is as friendly and stable as the iPhone OS platform. And no other phone has a managed repository or marketplace of it's developers applications as the iPhone does.