When I first heard about the iPhone and blogged about it earlier this year, I wondered mainly about how easy it would be to use it for inputting text. The movie shows more detail about this aspect but frankly, it doesn’t appear to be any easier to input text than I had originally thought. Apple claims that users who stick with the virtual keyboard will be highly proficient in typing with it in about a week, more so than with any other phone/keyboard device. Somehow that seems doubtful to me.

Another interesting aspect to the infomercial was the complete absence of any demo of the phone’s built-in camera. This isn’t a big deal at all for me; I think the marriage of most cell phones with cameras is a bad idea.

Finally, I still have a major concern about the limited built-in memory (max of 8 Gb).

But why am I bothering to write about something that I probably won’t be able to afford for a very long time, and would find hard to justify spending the money on? Well, because I think it is a very cool product and I am really hoping that it lives up to, and exceeds, all of the hype.

What I asked Web4Lib’ers was as follows. I’d love to hear from anyone who has comparative statistics:

“Taylor University’s Zondervan Library serves a mostly undergraduate student population of about 1,700. We have four wireless-enabled laptops available for checkout for general purpose uses including web browsing and library research. Our spring term is ending and out of curiosity I decided to tally up the circulation stats for them. It seemed by my observation that they were quite heavily used, in spite of the fact that we also have a large computer lab and several thin client workstations, but I wanted to know specifics. I found out that for the spring term (about 90 days in length), three out of the four laptops averaged close to 170 checkouts each. The fourth laptop was out of commission for most of the time. The total number of circulations for all of them was just under 500. I’m a mathematical ignoramus but I think that averages out to about 5 1/2 circulations per day. How does this compare with other libraries who circulate wireless laptops? I’m just curious to know if this is high, low, average.”