Kurt Schteck of City Tools recently interviewed Trey Harrell of iPhone Geek, getting his perspective on buzz and industry considerations surrounding the super-hyped launch.

Click here to read the whole interview 

From the interview:

Schteck - Often with “all in one” products, there is the widespread perception that when you combine a bunch of different features into one machine, there is brutal tradeoff somewhere. For example with the advent of printer-copier-scanner-faxes, many people feel that there is a “functionality sacrifice” in one of the features. With regards to the iPhone being a phone, internet browser, iPod and camera, do you think there will be a similar “functionality sacrifice” somewhere? Which feature do you think will take the hit ?

Harrell - I think that there’s a touch of functionality sacrifice — but mostly over Apple’s nigh legendary usability standards, and political dealings with AT&T. Convergence devices generally fail because they try to do too much, instead of providing an outstanding experience with reduced functionality.

I also think that the lack of instant messaging and application development have more to do with protecting AT&T’s cash cows ($0.15 per text message comes to mind, as does Skype)

The phone has wifi and unix underpinnings. With a true development kit, it would be reasonably simple to get skype working on it, and there’s no way AT&T would go for it.