This business of adding the price of the contract with the phone company is pretty misleading... how much would the contract cost for any other smartphone (or able-to-navigate phone)? Is it more expensive? How much more? In which case, multiply the difference by 12 months to find out the total expense of the iPhone. ALL phones have a "running cost".
Anyway, 600 dollars isn't that much, you know... I work in the telecomm area of our IT dept., and I spend all day getting smartphones for our directives; an HTC TyTn is more expensive than the iPhone, for example, and we already have several in our company, and my boss (among others) pays around $50 monthly fees, 'cause he has "flat rate", although it's limited to 1Gb, hehe. I think the real hullabaloo is because most people weren't really looking at phones in that price range until the iPhone showed up.
