There are a couple of points about the iPhone that might be worth mentioning.
When
It won’t be available in the US until June. Apple doesn’t normally announce products that far ahead, but you need to get regulatory approval for cellphones from the FCC a few months ahead of release, and that’s done in public, so that cat would have been out of the bag shortly anyway. Steve Jobs talked about a Europe release in the fourth quarter of 2007, and Asia in 2008. Presumably New Zealand would either be part of an Asia-Pacific release or it would come later, so it’ll be at least a year before we see them here.
Whom
Apple have partnered with Cingular in the US, but that doesn’t tell us much about who would carry the iPhone in New Zealand. Cingular competes with Vodafone in the US, but as far as I can tell they don’t have any part of the New Zealand market at the moment, so there’s no reason who Vodafone couldn’t get the contract here.
An important point is that at least one of the features on the phone (being able to choose which voice mail message to listen to instead of having to hear them in order) requires changes at the network operator’s end. This means that you won’t be able to buy an iPhone in the US and use all its features with another carrier. Where this goes probably depends on whether Apple or Cingular has patents on that feature.
How
Speaking of patents, Jobs mentioned that Apple has filed over 200 patents related to the iPhone, and intends to defend them vigorously. This obviously worked well for them with the iPod, as they’ve prevented competitors from copying the click-wheel. The interface features in the iPhone, however, might be a bit harder to protect - the basic concepts for a multi-touch interface have been doing the rounds in HCI research for a few years, and other companies have devices that do similar things.
If they can defend the patents, they’ll have a very strong lock on the cellphone market.
Whither
This is, of course, the first iPhone. If they follow the same approach as they did with the Mac and the iPod, there’ll likely be a few revisions of it for the next couple of years, then the product line will diversify into different models to suit different kinds of users. Both the Mac and the iPod suffered from design compromises in their first generations, and in both cases they were to do with storage capacity: the first Mac only came with 128K of RAM, and the iPod with a 5 gigabyte hard drive, both of which were on the low side by the standards of their respective times. The iPhone is likewise hampered by only having four or eight gigabytes of storage, enough for a couple of movies and some music, but not to carry around a significant part of your collection. I’d expect the next version to come with considerably more storage, as it becomes feasible to do so without compromising size or price.