Over the weekend, and quite by accident, I saw my first iPhone.

I expected to be underwhelmed. The iPhone, after all, has been so overhyped in the past several months that it would be nearly impossible for it to live up to it all, even though I’ve ignored the vast majority of it. And I have little use for cell phones at the best of times, let alone ones that cost $400 up front and require a two-year contract. I also have little use for Apple products in general, as they’re inevitably nice but have always struck me as way overpriced for what they offered.

In this case, I was dead wrong.

I don’t really care what the phone function is like, though from what I saw of it, it’s at least as good as any cell phone I’ve used before. The two things that really struck me about it were the interface and the pricing plan.

The interface is simply amazing. The screen is roughly the same size and resolution as the one on my Palm TX, but visibility isn’t limited to that area: it shows full web pages, miniaturized. The text is way too small to read when you look at it that way, but if you want to view a picture, you can easily do so — and you can turn the thing horizontal or vertical, and the screen will automatically reorient to that format. And when you want to read that too-small text, you simply put two fingers around the area you want to read and spread them apart (rather like a reverse pinch), and it zooms in on the area between them! Zooming out is equally simple, just put two fingers on the screen and pinch them together. Moving around it is simply a matter of putting a finger on the screen and dragging it in the direction you want it to go.

I don’t know what other pricing plans AT&T is offering, but the one that this machine was on had something like 180 included minutes per month and unlimited data transfers, and it was only $60! Every other cell phone with Internet access that I’ve ever encountered had a very small data-transfer limit, and the carriers charged an arm and a leg when you went over that limit (which is the main reason that I’ve never even considered an Internet-enabled cell phone before).

Having seen it in action, I think I’ve found a cell phone that I’d actually be willing to use, despite the $400 price tag and the two-year contract.

Of course, now that all the other cell phone manufacturers see how nice an interface can be, I expect they’ll all try to copy it. I also expect that they’ll do a crappy job of it for the first dozen or so iterations, and try to charge as much as if it were a full-fledged iPhone. But eventually the prices will come down to Earth and the quality will climb into the usable range… at that point, I might get one. But until that happens, the iPhone is the only contender.