The iPhone Introduction - Marketing At Its Best!

For you marketers out there, if you haven't seen Steve Jobs' iPhone announcement presentation at Macworld yesterday, it is worth taking the time to check it out. It is marketing at its best. Besides the fact that the product itself seems to be the coolest thing since, well, the iPod, Jobs shows how presentations should be done. He uses a lot of the basic tenets on giving a good presentation...

• Keep your messages simple and repeat them over and over again. The primary iPhone message was, "The iPhone is a three-in-one device -- an iPod, a cell phone, and an Internet communicator." There is no way you don't remember that after watching Jobs' presentation.
  
• Tell people what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you have just told them. For each element of the iPhone (iPod, cell phone, Internet communicator), there were key messages that were communicated, then demo'd, then communicated again.
• Keep your slides simple. The number of words used on each slide was minimal. You didn't spend all of your time trying to read the slides.
  

I am generally not a gadget guy but when it comes to the cell phone/PDA, I have been a devoted Palm/Treo guy from the get-go. After seeing Jobs' presentation, however, I wish I could have run out and purchased an iPhone right away. After thinking about it overnight and after reading some of the early hands-on reviews, my feelings are a bit more tempered. Here are a couple questions I need answered before I make a purchase:

• Will I be able to sync my Outlook contact/calendar info into iTunes? Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research is not sure about this. Would Apple really ignore Outlook's installed base of about 300 million users?
  
• Will I be able to drive the iPhone with one hand? One of the things I love about the Treo is that I can do almost everything I need to do with one hand. To drive the iPhone with one hand, the thumb needs to be used to make gestures. In Gizmodo's initial use of the iPhone, they think you may need to use your index finger for typing, not your thumb. Is this also true for other gestures?
  

Despite these questions, I am still excited about the iPhone and I plan to spend some time up at Macworld tomorrow to take a look a today's version of the Hope Diamond.