Buyer's guide: Look before leaping onto Apple's cell phone bandwagon

NEW YORK — The most eagerly awaited cell phone ever is upon us today. Should you resist the iPhone's breathless hype, or take the plunge?

Unless you're already standing in line outside an Apple or AT&T store, or are prepared to mug one of the first customers to come out after the 6 p.m. launch, the answer, at least for now, will have to be "let me think about it for a week or two."

The level of hype and demand for Apple Inc.'s phone is reminiscent of the debut of the PlayStation 3 game console in November, when minor riots broke out at some electronics stores. However, eBay prices for resold PS3s quickly fell, and two months later the console was in ample supply.

Apparently, much of the initial demand came from people who weren't really interested in getting them for themselves, but counted on being able to sell them to people who were.

It's quite possible that the iPhone will be subject to the same demand bubble. Check with the stores a month from now: If they have iPhones in stock, the bloom may be off the rose.

Hype aside, the iPhone is a radical design, a sliver of a device with a 3.5-inch glass screen and very few buttons. The iPhone differs by being designed to be touched with the fingertips rather than a stylus, making it a greater departure from the PC experience. (There have been several expensive phones with large touch screens before, generally using Windows Mobile software.)

The iPhone does e-mail, Web browsing, music and videos. It comes in two models — $499 for a 4-gigabyte version and $599 for 8 gigabytes of memory — and requires a two-year contract with AT&T Inc.

That's the basics. Here's a breakdown of who might want to consider an iPhone and who shouldn't:

• The music listener — Possibly. The big screen will make it easy to navigate a large music collection. A feature called Cover Flow shows your album covers like they're pages of an open book. However, the storage capacity is smaller than today's full-size iPods. The 4-gigabyte version fits about 800 songs, the 8-gigabyte version 1,800. The memory is not upgradable or expandable with external cards, so the 8-gig version is probably the one to get. Apple puts the battery life at 24 hours of audio playback, which is good.