"It feels amazing in your hand... It’s so thin, and the rounded stainless-steel edges are so smooth..."

Gushes David Pogue over the new, instantly beloved iPhone, which he's had a chance to play with. (TimesSelect link.) Are you, like me, now looking at the ads for all the supposedly amazing and cool other phone devices and thinking: Oh, that's so sad. They didn't know what was about to overwhelm them.

More from Pogue:

Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback.

I guess we'll all have to go back to the old two-finger style of typing. (I actually know a couple people who still type like that.) Or maybe one finger, if you hold the thing in one hand. Or is there some way to squeeze all your fingers onto the screen?

The Web browsing experience is incredible.

Ah! This is what I want!

You see the entire Web page on the iPhone’s screen. You double-tap any spot to zoom in. Or you use the two-fingered spread-apart gesture to “stretch” the image larger, or pinch your thumb and forefinger on the glass to zoom out again. The manipulation is seamless, smoothly animated—and useful. Using Google Maps to get you driving directions and maps, for example, is just light-years simpler and more powerful than on any other machine, thanks to this “rubber Web page” stretching technology.

If this thing is what it seems to be, I will happily leave the laptop at home and go about carrying next to nothing, stopping in cafés and restaurants, not giving a thought to whether there is WiFi.