When word of Apple's iPhone came trickling into the newsroom at the Consumer Electronics Show from San Francisco, there were yelps of excitement, anticipation — and protest.

"No 3G?!" one journalist moaned, referring to the lack of support for connecting to the fastest data transmission networks. Even while gawking at online video of the phone's features, others pooh-poohed the device's $500 price and the exclusive carrier contract with Cingular.

Steve Jobs, master of hyperbole and the overhyped product launch, succeeded in grabbing attention away from his industry's largest expo, some 420 miles southeast of his presentation in San Francisco.

But will the phone live up to the gushing blog posts, morning show babble and advance reviews it has already received?

We pored over the specs and talked to competitors and observers, and here's why it might not:

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NETWORK CAPABILITY

So about that 3G comment. The iPhone will use Cingular's EDGE network, which is considerably slower than the more advanced WCDMA technology. Many next-gen phones will allow for the faster speeds, including Samsung's Ultra Music Phone, launched at CES with yet-to-be-determined price and availability.

"The math is very convincing," says Muzib Khan, Samsung's vice president of product management and engineering. "If you have to download a music (file) which is 4 MB, iPhone could not do it over the regular network. They may have to go to a special hot spot or WiFi network. Otherwise one song will take several minutes to download, and that's not right."

With Samsung's phone, he said, "they'll be able to download music very efficiently."

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STORAGE

The iPhone will have as much storage capacity as iPod nanos currently have — either 4 or 8 GB. But there's currently no potential to expand beyond that, as most smartphones currently offer with SD or micro-SD memory card slots. Such cards are growing rapidly in capacity and also allow simple transfer of music or other files between devices.

With cards, "You just put it in and that's it," Khan says. "There is no limit. You can swap your content as well, you take your memory card to some other device and it plays."

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TOUCH SCREEN

While the iPhone touch screen innovation has its admirers, it also has drawbacks: exposure to oils on your fingers and the possibility of cracks or scratches that have plagued iPods in the past.

"I think it's really going to stand out," says Tark Abed, lead designer at Spreck Design, which has worked with Apple in the past. "They basically took what's really kind of a cobbled-together interface on most smart phones and most media phones and turned it into this beautiful flow, beautiful graphically."

But what about when it's not so beautiful anymore? "One of the things that people have been talking about is the longevity of the screen. If you put it in your pocket, is it going to get scratched? How's it going to wear?"

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asap staff reporter Ryan Pearson will never pay $500 for a phone, no matter what.

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