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As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.

This means that some 1 million people – within two days – took advantage of Apple’s swell offer, which was, and I quote: "Twice as fast. Half the price."

Now, way back when Nick was Not Keen on Kindle, he diagnosed what he thought was a developing trend in the release strategies of the lifestyle technology market. Namely, that the companies that manufacture these devices – the Kindle, the Nintendo Gameboy DS, and, I’m going to add, the iPhone – "lead with a subpar, feature-crippled design only to follow it with the design they should of come up with in the first place…"

I’m asking now: Can anybody out there give me any reason that the first-generation iPhone should ever have been mass produced? I mean, aside from the obvious fact that a handful or two million Apple fanboys and gadget-lifestyle types are going to buy whatever Apple comes out with? (Not that this isn’t a good reason, from Apple’s perspective.)

The first-gen iPhone was not only plagued by activation problems – which would by itself seem to indicate a premature release, at least in some sense – it has been alleged that "something like one in ten of the initial iPhones bought was defective," (and if you don’t strictly believe that number, you can still get the point by browsing the comments on that last post).

So here’s my question: Short of the first-gen iPhone being defective by design, what changed so much this year as to allow Apple to come up with such a substantially better phone, so much cheaper?

And here’s what I’m concerned is the answer: Nothing.