Sure, it’s got a cool UI and the touch screen doesn’t hurt either, but I wasn’t so sure there was really that much more to make it stand out from the competition. The ability to play music has made its way into a number of other phones, so that’s not a differentiator. And the Prada phone shows that others can quickly ape the same look-and-feel. The only real difference is that the iPhone is running Leopard, a computer operating system.

Then it occurred to me: the most valuable thing for people that exists on a mobile phone is their address book. And .Mac has had address book synching for years. Connect the dots and you no longer need an on-device address book.

Well, perhaps that’s a bit extreme. How does this sound: keep the address book local to the device, but synchronize it every so often with .Mac. Lose your phone and you’d still have your friends’ numbers (even if you’re out a couple of hundred dollars). I’d bet that kind of functionality would attract a lot of attention.

Like most ideas, this is not a new one (as a little research this evening revealed) but I think Apple has the opportunity to provide a level of integration between handset and software which really isn’t present in other phones.

I can synch my Sony Ericsson phone to my Powerbook with a couple of clicks and a bluetooth pairing, but what if all this was managed over the air, pushed from my iPhone and synched with my computer, all without me having to push any buttons? I personally think that would be pretty cool….

What other kinds of integration do you think .Mac might enable with the iPhone?

To get a line break within a cell in Excel X for the Mac, use the following key combination:

Apple-Option-Enter

You’re welcome….