Seth Porges asked yesterday, Is Steve Jobs Sick Of The Cell Phone Industry Already?, and answered, well, Yes.  The iPod Touch, which steals some of the iPhone’s thunder, and will no doubt take some some sales away from iPhone, is proof enough.  And then there’s Beck’s “Cellphone’s Dead,” playing as the Touch’s demo song.  Opines Sascha Segan of PC Magazine, “The phone is the weakest part of the iPhone anyway.”

Well ... not quite.  First, Porges and Segan are making the mistake that industry analysts - in contrast to media historians - often do.  They’re equating the industry, or social and economic structures surrounding a medium, with what the actual medium does or doesn’t do, itself.  A recent example: television national networks were spent by the 1980s.  But television - the enjoyment of audio-visual narrative, news, etc on a screen under your control - was as powerfully appealing as ever.  The result was the not decline of television, but its migration to cable and BitTorrent.

The phone is not the weakest part of the iPhone - it’s the strongest part.  A device that gave us great connections to all of the Internet would be wonderful - but its magic is that it also lets us call someone we love, or a business partner, and receive calls from same.  A conversation with a real person - if he or she is the right person - usually trumps anything else we might be up to online.

AT&T and its antiquated system is the weakest part.  But AT&T was never in the vanguard of cell phone service in the first place.

Prediction: iPhone will continue and thrive with its cell phone service prominent and important - but with other carriers and other plans.