I've just returned from the lovely Victoria Gardens Shopping Center where I did not...buy an iPhone 3G.  I did get close though (as the pictures from outside the store attest to).

I was really torn right up until I got to the front door.

On one hand, Mark Evans' series of negative posts on Rogers of Canada had been pushing me into it.  At least, in the same way parents push their kids into eating their green beans because there are starving children somewhere. 

"Just accept your AT&T contract because there are iPhone-less children in Canada who would kill for such a deal" was what I kept hearing in my head.

But despite that the logic was really stacked against the purchase.  I'd have to pay $500 AND extend my AT&T contract another two years.  Plus I'd have to pay $30 more a month for a plan with 200 less SMS messages (my current one has 200, the new one would have none).  The software on it would be identical to what I could get with my first generation iPhone so that wasn't worth it and since most of my browsing is done on WiFi anyway there wasn't much to be gained there.  The only other thing new was the GPS and I already have a GPS (that does turn by turn directions and downloads traffic data no less).

Duncan Riley's unboxing last night also did a lot to deter me.  Seeing the two of them side by side as he pointed out what appeared to be no difference in the physical dimensions made an impression.  As did the cheap plastic back which, imho, makes it look worse than the iPhone 1.0. 

But the clincher was the line. 

Even if I had been ready to buy one today there's no way I was standing in line.  Especially when that line didn't seem to be moving (these photos are from 1:30pm which is a full 5 and a half hours after the store opened)

You can't really tell but the line was basically to the end of Apple store which constituted about 30 or so people waiting to get in plus a store full of people who were waiting inside.  The two attendants were there to let anyone in who wasn't getting an iPhone but they told me that was essentially no one.  Which meant everyone in the packed store was part of the line.

There was just no way...

So hope Apple comes up with an actual worthy upgrade some time in the future but for now I'm sticking with my old faithful first gen version.

I've said it before but I'll say it again, I misjudged the Kindle.  I, along with most tech bloggers, pegged it for a quick death with its seemingly high price tag and seemingly low number of features. 

But now Time is reporting that Kindle sales have doubled in the last two months (on top of sales that appeared to be impressive before that).  Here's the quote...

Is the Kindle starting to catch fire with consumers? From the Department of Inscrutable Data Points comes word that e-book sales for Amazon's Kindle — its digital reading device-have doubled during the past two months. Kind of, sort of, maybe.

According to a source at Amazon, "on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles." Amazon is notoriously tight lipped about sales data, and the new line of business that the Kindle represents for the online retail powerhouse has been especially frustrating for analysts and media to parse. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print.

Though Kindle is important on a tech level what makes it fascinating is how it bucked the gadget trend.  The perception is that "gadgets" have to appeal to the tech crowd first and that they then trickle down to the average consumer. 

But the more I look at the Kindle the more I realize its success is a tribute to the idea that the average consumer doesn't want the same things that "Gadget hounds" do.  Looking at the device it's practically feature deficient.  But it has three things that average users seem to care about...

• A screen that is easy on the eyes,
• A physical size that's comfortable in the hand
• And a wireless feature that makes purchasing easy. 

Those seem to be enough for most people. 

As with any Kindle post I need to give the standard caveat.  Amazon refuses to release actual numbers so we really don't know specifically how successful the device is.  But whatever the numbers are the trend line is clearly headed northwards and that's more than any tech blogger expected when it was released.