This is really a post that should have been written in July, when my 4GB iPhone went out of the rotation. Given the amount of space devoted here to the acquisition, it’s not fair to leave the impression that I still have one—particularly with the iPhone/Apple (NDSQ: AAPL) events of the past week.

The iPhone had a lot going in its favor: style; good call quality; excellent video screen; features like the stock look-up, stopwatch, YouTube player.  If I could afford to own and maintain two $400-$500 handsets, the iPhone would be one of them even without Flash. But it wasn’t enough on its own and it didn’t replace the functionality of the Cingular 8125 I’d had for more than a year. 

To answer the question: would I have been irked by the price drop? By $100, probably not. By $200 after only two months, yes.

More about my experience in extended entry:

Yes, the touch screen was more elegant than the one on the HTC smart PDA but the device wasn’t an upgrade from the Edge unit and its lack of download ability—put another way, its reliance on web services—made it less efficient overall. It was one thing to have a disappearing map when I drove across town and quite another to be sitting in the parking lot of a McDonald’s outside Joliet, Ill., trying to get directions to a hotel on the other side of Chicago and failing miserably. When I could get the right signal, the search kept defaulting to the wrong thing. My companion would have thrown it out a window given the chance. I couldn’t cut and paste or do a lot of the tasks I’d grown used to on the clunkier 8125. The aspects I liked were very enticing and close to addictive; the ones I didn’t meant it couldn’t be my only phone/PDA. I decided to bring it back and look again when the next versions emerge.

I revisited the idea last week when the price came down and the iTouch was announced. Maybe the iTouch would be a solution … but, no. True, it has the WiFI, the video screen, the slick touch screen and the style. It even has YouTube. But as similar as they seem, turns out the iPod Touch is missing more than the phone. No email other than web mail, no stock checking, etc. (More at Apple 2.0.) I looked for a refurbished 4GB model thinking the price might be low enough. Not available.

By the way, I no longer have an 8125 either. The mini-USB port went bad, finally giving me a reason to switch to the faster 3G 8525. Turned out to be a lucky break:  neither of the other phones would have worked in Japan or Korea but the new one tuned right in. Now if only I can get the Flash to work.

Note: The iPhone I took back actually was my second one: the first was replaced a week in because of battery problems. It would read almost fully charged, then empty after one brief YouTube video. The Genius Bar tech said video would drain it fast, but agreed the battery life should be better. Either the battery wasn’t charging fully or the software was misreading it. Because the battery is built in, I couldn’t test it with another one or get a backup. The second iPhone battery reading was more accurate but still a guessing game.