So what if you don’t want to use the iPhone as a phone?

A perverse notion perhaps, until you add up the cost of the minimum $60 a month voice and data plan that is provided by AT&T.

It comes to more than $1,400 over the two-year minimum period, meaning buying an iPhone can be a $2,000 commitment.

Hence, some iPhone owners are talking about ways round activating their phones, from bent paper clips to hackers’ code.

The bent paper clip method involves removing the SIM card from a friend’s activated iPhone by pushing the clip in a small hole to spring the SIM card. This is then put in your phone to be resynced and activated again on iTunes. The SIM card can then be returned and you will have an iPhone that cannot make regular calls but will have a wi-fi connection for surfing and iPod functionality. Eventually, someone may come up with a solution for Voice over IP calls using the wi-fi connection.

The hacker’s way in was discovered by DVD Jon, who earned his moniker after cracking the copy-protection codes on DVDs. He posted details on his blog this week and commenters reported success using his method.

I wonder if a third, even easier, way is to cancel your AT&T contract within the 30-day grace period. The phone line may be deactivated, but you will still have the SIM and hopefully an unlocked iPhone, although syncing it with iTunes could alert Apple to its deactivated status.

Most people will stick with AT&T, but Jajah is touting how you can avoid expensive international roaming charges by signing up for its service through the Safari browser.

Meanwhile, many people have had the same problem as me in connecting to their wi-fi networks. Reading Apple forums, the iPhone appears to have a problem resolving DNS addresses in many cases. I followed advice to manually change my DNS address to 4.2.2.2 and am now surfing at broadband speeds.

Small, loss-making tech companies with under $30m in revenues were not meant to find their way to Wall Street anymore.

Heavy-handed regulation imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and greater caution on the part of investors who had had their fingers burnt before had supposedly closed off the option of an IPO. Any internet start-up worth its salt could expect instead to find itself swallowed whole by Google, Microsoft or IBM. Silicon Valley has been working on the rule-of-thumb assumption that a company needs at least $100m in revenues, and some experience of operating at a profit, before contemplating a public listing.

Someone seems to have forgotten to tell that to Constant Contact, which just filed for an IPO (registration statement here.) An on-demand email marketing company that hasn’t made a profit in its first 12 years, Constant Contact notched up losses of $11.6m last year on sales of $27.6m. And this in the same week that Netsuite, Larry Ellison’s on-demand software company, also registered to go public. Netsuite lost $23m on sales of $67m last year.

Little by little, tech IPOs have been bouncing back, making this (so far) the best year since the beginning of the decade (though the M&A action has fallen off at the same time - and as the National Venture Capital Association points out, M&A will always be a more likely exit route for most start-ups.) The message: this may be nothing like the tech bubble of the 1990s, but the froth that has been building up in the private tech finance markets is finally spilling over to Wall Street.

I admit it - as journalists go I’m pretty old-school. A telephone and a typewriter are good enough for me (OK, maybe you can throw in Google as well.) Reid Hoffman, boss of LinkedIn, is always telling me what a great tool his social networking site is for making contacts and digging out information but, well, somehow I could never quite bring myself to network that way. Let’s face it: you wouldn’t have found Deep Throat plastering comments over Woodward and Bernstein’s Facebook wall.

This is a cautionary tale about what happens when old-school journalism meets Web 2.0. (Confession: it hurts to be as transparent as this, but sometimes you just have to let the readers in on a few trade secrets.)

It started over a swanky dinner in the opulent Silicon Valley surroundings of the Kohl Mansion. Munjal Shah, CEO of visual search engine Like.com (worth checking out, an interesting idea), let on that it was now cheaper to hire in the Valley than Bangalore. He had sacked his Indian engineers and moved jobs to the US. He blogged about it here. Interesting.

A couple of days later I bumped into Reid at a swanky party at the opulent Silicon Valley home of venture capitalist Heidi Roizen (honestly, it’s not always like this.) Reid has money in a few Valley start-ups, had he heard of anyone else shifting jobs from high-cost India to the gritty third-world suburbs of Palo Alto or Mountain View?

Unbeknown to this reporter, Reid took it on himself to demonstrate the power of LinkedIn by posing this question on the network. He got quite a discussion started (free sign-up required). Futher surprise when Mujal popped up to join the chat - we had exchanged messages after the dinner but failed to talk, and he was now on vacation and proving hard to pin down.

Eventually Munjal emailed back. It turns out that a couple of other journalists had seen the LinkedIn discussion and contacted him. They hadn’t written about Like.com’s reverse-offshoring yet, he said, but he was sure they would. That was enough for me: time to get this story into print fast before the competition have their way with it (the final story, from Monday’s FT, is here. The Wall Street Journal’s take, appearing a day later, is here.)

This saga has a serious point. Journalists are not the only people who guard their network of contacts and their ideas jealously. These are valuable assets. Online social networking seems to be turning into the latest business fad, but there are drawbacks to carrying on your business in plain view.

Remember those rumours about Google getting into the handset business with its own mobile phone? The arrival of the iPhone should have finally put paid to that kind of talk - Google couldn’t dream of out-doing Apple, and is right to focus instead on trying to be the killer app (the maps and YouTube features on the iPhone are surprisingly effective.)

Google’s phone strategy goes deeper than this, though, and could eventually put it in conflict with its new ally. Today brings confirmation of the reports that it has acquired GrandCentral Communications, a private company whose software is designed to simplify communications across multiple devices. Among the features: a single voicemail box that links your home, work and mobile phones, and a single number that can reach you wherever you are. Some of its features, like sending you an email when you get a voicemail message, sound very close to the sort of things Apple is doing with the iPhone.

Steve Jobs has said that, for all its high style, the real secret sauce in the iPhone is the software. Apple is out to make it easier to manage your digital content across multiple devices, putting the iPhone at the centre of a wider corporate strategy. In its own way, Google is trying to do the same thing - though unlike Apple, it wants to play in a bigger ecosystem that stretches beyond hardware choices. Eventually, these visions are set to collide.

When we headed down to the Apple store last week ahead of the iPhone launch, we found a substantial number of punters who were hoping to flip their newly-purchased iPhones for a substantial premium on Ebay. Sorry to take the wind out of your sails, guys, but data released today by Ebay indicate that the secondary iPhone market may not be as vibrant as some people predicted.

Just over 3,770 iPhones had changed hands on Ebay as of 3:45pm on Monday, at an average price of $701.98. A further 5,483 were listed for sale. Assuming that most of the iPhones sold were 8GB models (a Piper Jaffray note this weekend said 95 per cent of customers were walking out with 8GB models), that’s a premium of just $100 or so over the purchase price, and that’s not even including tax. That’s hardly a great return, especially when factoring in the opportuity cost of taking time off work to wait in line for hours, or, in some cases, overnight. 

It’s not all bad news for iPhone entrepreneurs, however. On Saturday, one iPhone sold for an eye-popping $12,500, according to Ebay Marketplace Research, which warns that Ebay "cannot verify that the transaction is complete, however the sale appears legitimate."

One born every minute, I guess.

So my second impressions of my iphone are about the same as my first.

- Typed on my Blackberry handheld.

A my awxpms impresiima of my iPhone we sour rw saw amy diats.

- The same sentence typed on my iPhone.

Yes, I still can’t get used to this keyboard even after watching the video about using it on the Apple site. It does advise using one finger at first, rather than two thumbs, but I can’t work that way and in some applications you can’t switch the orientation to get a wider keyboard.

What else? I’m still not enamoured with Web browsing, which I hoped would be the killer app for this phone. I’m still using the slower Edge network - the iPhone won’t work with my home wi-fi network, even though I’ve a dozen other devices that have configured themselves without a hitch.

When browsing, the web page itself is initially too small and, while touching it to magnify it, it’s very easy to click another link and go sailing off somewhere else. In hope rather than expectation, I clicked on a link to some cricket commentary. Needless to say, it did not work, as Windows Media Player and Real Player plug-ins are not included.

Apple, in its proprietary way, has complete control of the experience. So the approved Yahoo weather and stock ticker icons work okay along with Google’s YouTube and Maps, but don’t expect to be listening to unfettered internet radio on this device any time soon or any non-approved video sites.

I am planning to return the iPhone once I’ve finished reviewing it. I was not planning to buy one for personal use and, after trying it out, still feel the same way. While Apple offers a superior user experience, it doesn’t give me the freedom to create my own.

Apple is ignoring the Web 2.0 trend of sharing and self-expression. It doesn’t even allow its owners to make their own ringtones from a favourite song or buy a third party’s.

It is also Version 1.0 and has too many features lacking right now - GPS, more memory, 3G wireless, instant messaging, no memory card slots to name a few.

The iPhone is beautiful, but just not my type. The best thing it has done is to raise the bar for every other handset maker to come up with a better phone.