Yahoo’s Buzz Log shows that searchers are really curious about the price of the thing, especially since Apple started advertising them on TV. Searches for "iphone price" are up 108%.

Disappointment in how expensive it is, coupled with the painful two-year commitment, is up 1000%.

So my initial thought is, the buzz enough to float it to a success, but the price of coolness will be a major deterrent.

But Porges delineates what else he thinks will go wrong on launch:

…when the iPhone comes, Digg will likely be full of horror stories from the poor saps who camped out at their local AT&T store, only to find their purchase was buggier than a camp cabin.

The bugs include cracked screens from back-pocketed carry, delayed texting, and short battery life.

But what was most interesting about the predictions, was a reminder about how rushed it all seems:

So they set the release date as June 29 — a Friday, and the last weekday of the month. This, coupled with the fact that Apple has never, in recent memory, released a product on a Friday, should make everybody say “Hmmmm,” and suggests they took a calculated risk of releasing a product that might be a little buggy (probably about as bad as the first run of screen-flickering, case-cracking, motherboard-busted MacBooks), rather than suffer the embarrassment of not keeping their word.

And then you think back to a couple of other instances. Apple CEO Steve Jobs pulled the curtain on the project, quite conveniently, a week before LG unveiled a quite similar Prada-branded phone. LG won an award for that phone and called Apple a copycat. They didn’t even wait until they had the trademark issue worked out with Cisco.

Remember the Engadget leak? Apple may want you to forget it, especially since the jury’s still out about whether they’ll be investigated by the feds. A reporter who believed his source as solid as could be, quoting an internal email that made the rounds at Apple HQ convincing enough to fool even Apple employees as to its authenticity, dropped Apple stock into the depths upon being reported.

That internal email said the iPhone would be delayed. After a loss of $4 billion in market cap, Apple swore the email was a fake.

We’ll all be keeping tabs to see if Porges’ Prognostication comes true.

Though LG was quite silent during all the iPhone madness (though we tried and tried to get them to talk to us), the company went ahead and released the specs on its new Prada-branded phone due for launch in Europe and Asia this year. But still they said nothing about the obvious similarities.

Well, according to a Korean website, LG has finally spoken up, in broken English. At a press conference in Spain, head of LG’s Mobile Handset R&D Center, Woo-Young Kwak (no relation to Long Duk Dong) expressed what appears to be displeasure, perhaps even an allegation:

“We consider that Apple copycat Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006.”

We take that to mean ‘Apple stole our idea.’

But, for the skeptic, isn’t four months a little short for industrial espionage turnaround? Maybe not, but Apple says they’ve been working on the iPhone for a lot longer than that, filing 200 patents in the meantime.

It may be more realistic to imagine that Apple saw the pics of the LG phone floating around the Internet and decided to get a jump on them by launching iPhone a week ahead, which is a really smart move, and may actually explain why Apple revealed it six months ahead of time, before the FCC had even approved it.

Kwak should have just admitted, "Apple stole our thunder."

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Milan, meet Mountain View. Since everyone at the Googleplex seems to be rolling in tons of cash, why not make Google’s search engine the place to let people know about the latest and greatest from their product line with Google ads?

A Bloomberg report cited Google product management VP Jonathan Rosenberg as noting search ads reach consumers who are actively looking for a particular product, where an expensive print ad in Vanity Fair might not even be seen by people who are ready to spend on Prada.

Rosenberg compared the two media outlets on cost. For 28 cents, a click-through Google ad sends a user to Prada who wants to buy a $1,000 handbag, where a magazine ad costs about 10 cents per reader and may not even influence a purchase, let alone deliver someone right to a point of sale online to make a purchase.

With a circulation of 1.1 million, Rosenberg said in the article the Vanity Fair ad would price between $100,000 and $110,000 for a full-page ad.

Those ads would have to deliver upwards of a hundred handbag buyers (depending on margins) just to break even on the ad’s price. This is why online advertising has become a multi-billion dollar business, why Google has a market cap of about $120 billion, and why companies like Yahoo, Ask.com, and soon Microsoft have set up online advertising networks.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.