Unlike Godot, Apple's iPhone will appear, and right on curtain time to boot. The venue is Apple and AT&T stores around the country, and the opening is at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 29, the day this piece went up on the web site. Potential customers around the country waited in line for days to be the first to buy one. Yes, that's right: waited on-line to buy a cell phone. But the iPhone is also the next generation iPod and may well be as market-changing as Apple's signature MP3 player was.

We had hoped to have a review for you here, but were unable to obtain a model to use. According to the Washington Post, we were not alone; Apple provided so few pre-release models to reviewers that even tech-focused international publications like Macworld Magazine had to send their writers to wait in line at stores like everyone else. The blessed few who did receive pre-release iPhones, like Walt Mossberg of the New York Times, have said the iPhone, for the most part, lives up to the hype. There is a list of features to be added or improved, and Mossberg is less than thrilled with the level of connectivity AT&T provides. But overall, the new product seems to be a winner.

I personally tend not to buy new devices in their first release, as version 2.0 generally fixes most of the first-round of complaints like the ones Mossberg mentioned. The price of the iPhone and my immediate need for a new phone several weeks ago closed the deal.

My Treo 650 had just croaked, and my extra cell phone insurance package only covered dropping it on asphalt or in the pool, not just having it die on me, and so I needed a new one. I assumed I'd be picking up a new Treo, but was willing to look at other "smart phones" with an ASCII keyboard. I needed some form of Windows Mobile phone, since RIT, where I work, has moved to Microsoft Exchange servers for mail and calendar functions.

Since I was holding off on the iPhone, the timing was right to look at the newly arrived Samsung BlackJack. This is a PDA phone with a lot of strengths. And while there's not iPhone's hype, the BlackJack does show streamed video and play XM audio on a faster AT&T network (the 3G version) than the last generation network the iPhone uses.

What was important to me was the synching of calendar and e-mail, which works well on the BlackJack. Your mail choices include Outlook e-mail, web access for webmail, and the "Good Mobile Messaging."

Downsides include Windows Mobile Smart Phone Edition, which doesn't include the Microsoft Office Mobile Suite or document editing capabilities. Instead, you get the "Picsel Viewer Suite," which allows viewing but not editing of Word and Excel documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs. This wasn't crucial to me but can be for road warriors looking for a phone that provides those capabilities. The lack of built in WiFi might also be considered a minus. Last but not least, the phone uses a dedicated micro USB cable instead of a standard one. This is a particularly small-minded choice on Samsung's part, I must say.

Upsides are that it comes with a reasonably good camera and two different capacity batteries.When I picked it up from AT&T a few weeks ago, the pricing and rebates put it at around $75 versus hundreds more for the Treos. It was also $20 less than CompUSA was selling it for.

To try one out you can go to any of the Cingular or AT & T wireless stores in town.

For a web-based presentation on the phone, try this website.

For online specs and pricing in our area, try this one.