Here’s a little known fact about the amazing iPhone phenomenon: In the days since its release, the iPhone has reportedly sold well over 500,000 units. Astonishingly, there have been over 500,000 blog posts on the iPhone as well. Yes, that’s right, one blog post for each iPhone sold! But that’s not the amazing part. The truly surprising thing about all of the iPhone hype is that so little of the commentary has focused on the fact that we’re finally getting a good look at the long awaited next-generation iPod.

The iPhone is clearly a glimpse of what the iPod will look like in the not to distant future. There’s a reason why Steve Jobs has been calling the iPhone “the best iPod ever“. The problem, of course, is that the iPhone costs a fortune and requires a long term contract with AT&T. For most music lovers looking for an updated iPod, the price and service requirements are a deal-breaker.

But what if Apple were to produce an iPhone without the phone? There’s reason to believe that’s exactly what the next iPod will be. The current iPod has not had a significant upgrade in a while. When Apple finally refreshes the iPod product line here are some reasonable assumptions of what we can expect:

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As I pointed out yesterday, this is not a full-fledged scientific breakdown of the iPhone. It’s just some stuff I’ve noticed while using it in my everyday life. Yesterday, I took a look at some larger things about Apple’s iPhone — availability, ease of set-up, and AT&T’s EDGE network.

Today, I’m going to look at some of the other things that I’ve noticed about the iPhone while I’ve been using it for the last week or so.

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The iPhone has been out for a little over a week, and I broke down and purchased one while I was on vacation. And while this is hardly a scientific breakdown of the iPhone — there are zillions of those out there — here are some things I’ve noticed about it in the first week or so of actual everyday use.

• The widely anticipated shortage has not materialized. It looks like if you want an iPhone, you can get one. Check eBay, and you can tell how the people who thought that they would make a Playstation-like killing aren’t doing so hot. Nobody is biting at their “Buy it Now” prices of $900 and above.

  This seems to indicate two things: the demand is not as intense as people though and/or Apple has done a pretty good job in keeping the pipeline open. It’s probably a combination of the two, as illustrated by the story of how I stumbled into purchasing mine in the first place . . .

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Several reports today that Apple has started its experiment with offering music that isn’t restricted by any Digital Rights Management. They are calling it iTunes Plus — I guess that the “Plus” is the freedom to do whatever you want with the songs you download.

Which, of course, shouldn’t really be a plus, but rather a default. But “iTunes Default” or “iTunes As It Shoulda Been In The First Place” probably wouldn’t have gone over too well with the marketing folks, so “iTunes Plus” it is.

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OK, sure, everybody is all anticipatory for Apple’s upcoming iPhone, which is set to conquer the world in a few short weeks. And why not? It’s essentially got everything: web, email, text, music, and it runs fracking OS X, to boot. And yet, it’s not even out yet and Nokia has gone and potentially trumped it.

Because Nokia is adding a true killer app to one of their upcoming phones: the Lightning Detector!

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A lot of hay was made yesterday about a wide-reaching survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. For example, one of the things that got serious play was that about half of the people out there still don’t live their lives around high-tech products.

Instead, I guess, they are living their lives around such mundane things as their jobs, their churches, their families and so forth. Then the survey broke down the actual users into sub-groups, and explained various things about the sub-groups. It was all very interesting and informative, and then I got to the very end . . .

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There are stories everywhere about Amazon launching a music store, as soon as next month, that would feature unprotected downloadable music.

If true, and we should point out that the stories about Amazon launching a music download service have been around for over a year now, it would be the biggest thing in digital music since the iPod, and maybe even more important than iTunes. It would also make Kirk seem scarily prescient, as he predicted this exact thing back in January.

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Now that a major record label has finally consented to sell music without DRM restrictions it would be easy to portray Steve Jobs as a hero of the anti-DRM movement. After all, it was just two months ago that Jobs published his scathing letter criticizing the music industry for its reliance on DRM.

The problem is, Steve Jobs isn’t really an anti-DRM crusader. In fact, he has a pretty obvious double standard when it comes to DRM. Jobs has made it clear that when we talk about the death of DRM we’re really only talking about the death of DRM for music. As Jobs said during Monday’s press conference:

“Video’s pretty different than music because the video industry does not distribute 90% of its content DRM-free — never have. So I think they’re in a pretty different situation.”

Spoken like the single largest shareholder of the Disney Corporation.

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By now you’ve all heard that EMI has finally agreed to allow Apple to sell DRM-free downloads through the iTunes service. While the agreement has been widely publicized, the details of the negotiations behind the scenes are generally not known. To hear EMI CEO Eric Nicoli tell it, you would almost think that Apple has been preventing EMI from selling DRM-free music.

As Nicoli told the LA Times yesterday:

We’ve always argued that the best way to combat illegal traffic is to make legal content available at decent value and conveniently. And we take the views that we have to trust the consumer.

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Apple is shipping its long-awaited AppleTV today, and from everything that I’ve read, instead of being the final step in getting computer video to the TV, it’s actually a huge disappointment in that regard.

Rather than taking this opportunity to seize what is still a wide-open market, Apple has instead opted to go after a narrow market share: the people who have downloaded videos, etc over iTunes. That’s it.

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