If you step away from the hype and screaming….and I mean step way back, this is what I think the iPhone brings to the party.

1. Although it may be lacking alot of features that most pedestrian phones have, the iPhone has stood up and proclaimed that it’s OK to be different. It does this with it’s biggest feature, that cool mutlitouch big LCD. The iPhone dares to not flip, or click. It dares to rethink how we access features. Apple spent so much time being daring and working on whats different that they had little time to work on the common place.

2. It does show that American Industrial design is alive and well. Right or wrong it’s nice to push the envelope.

3. It does raise the bar as to what is expected from the next gen phones, engineers at Mot and Nokia are probably loving this. LG and Samsung engineers are probably confused as to what to copy next.

4. Apple has a good year or two of work ahead of them to make the next gen (probably 3rd or 4th gen) iPhones what they should have been to start with. When that happens you should be selling your RIM stock. Until then RIM is laughing all of the way to to bank.

5. The iPhone is a crappy feature locked PDA with a poor choice in phone service. My old HP Win CE PDA can kick the iPhones ass with add on applications, but my HP pales in comparison to the eye candy interface and gee wiz touch screen of the iPhone.

I think I’ll keep my phone and PDA for now, but maybe in a year or two when gen 3 or 4 of the iPhone comes out I could be a Kool Aid drinker too.