I started this morning with "The iPhone doesn't have video". That is Chris' reason #17 of 20 reasons why he didn't buy an iPhone on day 1. I agree with several of his points. This video is about 20 minutes long - I found it very easy to watch the whole thing, despite the fact that Chris gets a little agitated at times during the video.

The iPhone Rant ~ The Chris Pirillo Show

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

I also saw a fantastic post on RoughlyDrafted.com called The iPhone Threat to Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Real, BREW, Symbian. The gist of the article is this:

If Apple’s purposeful omission of Flash on the iPhone is giving you déjà vu, it’s probably because Apple did the very same thing to rid the world of Microsoft’s domination of the online music, media, and DRM industry.

Three years ago, Apple refused to include support for Windows Media on the iPod. That resulted in the online music market being opened up and pushed toward the vendor agnostic MPEG AAC format.

The exclusion of flash makes sense. Embed a multimedia object that can be played by your local player - in this case, Quicktime, but the files (MP4, MP3, AAC) are open standards so any environment with a native player should support them. I think Zune plays AAC... I know PSP does. Everyone plays MP4 - everyone.

As for video recording, this tweet by Scott points to a PDF that supposedly says iPhone includes an h.263/h.264 encoder as well as decoder - meaning it should be able to do videoconferencing (that's h.263) and recording. When that comes and the price drops about $250, I'll consider iPhone again.