I have confession to make: I couldn't give a hoot about the iPhone.

As a technology pundit and entrepreneur, I'm not supposed to say that. On the contrary, I'm supposed to be 1) wowed by Steve Jobs' brilliance; 2) awed by the iPhone's cool technology and sleek packaging; 3) eagerly analysing how the device is going to change the world; 4) racing to make my own web business mobile-friendly (read: iPhone-friendly); 5) tut-tutting about Apple's command-and-control approach the business, just to keep by critical credentials up; and, of course, 6) rushing out to get one of my own.

But I don't care about the iPhone.

I currently carry a Blackberry, because my work life is so e-mail-centric that I get anxious when I'm off e-mail for too long at a stretch. And of course it’s now hard to imagine being without a cellphone. Maybe the iPhone would be somewhat better for these things, but it won't change the fundamentals. Check e-mail and make phone calls. That's really all I want to do on a mobile device.

Now in part I am out of the mainstream, because I have never been a huge picture-taker or gamer, and I don’t like wandering the world listening to music through headphones. I'm not a big social networker or Twitterer, and I don’t text much. It's not that I'm antisocial, I just don't feel compelled to keep up on the minute-to-minute doings of all my friends and acquaintances.

Reading, writing and searching the web is tedious on the Blackberry and somewhat less so on the iPhone. But I already have a very good Apple-made device for reading, writing and searching the internet. It's called a PowerBook. The basic size limitation of the iPhone or any other hand-held device means that it's not a substitute for the PowerBook, it's a supplement. And how often do I need to read, write or search the web so urgently that it can't wait until I can open up the Powerbook? Not very often at all.

Frankly, when I'm not at my computer, I kind of like not being at my computer. There is a world out there that has nothing to do with digital information, and it's good to be in it sometimes. I remember one day in Paris watching a busload of Japanese tourists descend at Trocadero, across from the Eiffel Tower, and some of them were literally looking through the rangefinders of their cameras as they descended, so busy recording that they never even saw the view with the naked eye.

That's why I don't like wearing headphones and taking pictures. Unmediated human experience actually has its charms.

My personal habits probably contribute to my lack of urgency about developing the mobile-services side of NewWest.Net. But I also think that there is a tremendous amount of hype around mobile and it will probably develop more slowly than the digerati anticipate. The services that would make mobile fundamentally more useful from a consumer standpoint – easy, instant access to real reviews of restaurants that happen to be near where you are standing, for example – are in their infancy. We've got time.

I am indeed duly wowed by Steve Jobs' brilliance, and my point is not that the iPhone isn't a breakthrough device. But the world is hardly in need of another pundit extolling Jobs' brilliance. There was about a three-day period back in the early 1990s when I was his best friend – calling me at home: “hey Jonathan, it's Steve, Steve Jobs” – but that was only because he desperately wanted me to write something positive about his then-company, struggling Next Computer. Now he doesn't have to pretend to be a nice guy, which I'm sure is unfortunate for the reporters who deal with him these days.

As to the iPhone's overall impact on the tech and telecom business, it seems from a distance that AT&T, the iPhone network in the US, is changing Apple more than the other way around, which is hardly a recipe for transformation.

Maybe Google Android devices will shake things up in a way that makes all of this more interesting. In the end, though, most of my technology needs revolve around business, and mobility therefore is a mixed blessing. My guess is I'm not the only one.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard