Given the Apple iPhone build-up, I was surprised to wake up this morning and find the world pretty much the same as it was yesterday, before Steve Jobs and his iPhone opened to us the promised land of infinite coolness.

Even my 16 year-old, a graduate student in the school of cool, found the advent of the iPhone a “whatever.” Perhaps it’s his experience with two iPods that died promptly after the warranty ran out that gives him a healthy distrust of Apple’s newest toy. Now he plays music on his $99 Razr phone.

It seems we’re not the only doubters. Today New York Times Business columnist Joe Nocera joined the fray as a skeptic, taking a close look at the iPhone’s non-replaceable battery and its snails-pace Internet access (to reduce battery drain, no less!). Nocera also describes the Kafta-esque experience of talking to Apple’s PR drones.

The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights also took a look at the iPhone and found it wanting. In addition to the battery problem, the Foundation notes that AT&T and Apple have written a whopping $175 cancellation fee into the contract if you terminate within two years – as you might be tempted to when the battery’s likely one-year useful life runs out.

For the record, my four year-old Palm Treo may be the apogee of un-cool, but the battery has not needed replacement yet.

As might be expected, even before the Apple iPhone hits retailer shelves, its sexy features are showing up on other handsets. Like visual voicemail. German company SimulScribe just announced a “downloadable visual voicemail application” — SimulSays Beta — for the BlackBerry 8800 series, BlackBerry Pearl, BlackBerry Curve and Windows Mobile. The service normally starts at $10 a month, but the beta is free. However, in its rush to get the news out, SimulScribe appears to have forgotten to put the info on the website.

Dual mode phones just might be crossing the chasm and T-Mobile may be positioning itself for a spot at the head of the pack. This week the company launched the T-Mobile(R) HotSpot @HomeSM service. And coming along for the ride is the Nokia 6086 dual mode phone, also announced today. At home and in hotspots, calls are made over the WiFi network. Leave the hotspot, and calls automatically go through T-Mobile’s GSM/GPRS/EDGE wireless network. The press release lets you infer that the handoff is seamless, but I’m dubious because it doesn’t say it directly.

And speaking of WiFi, Mountain View, CA-based startup WeFi is opening up the beta of its WiFi community. WeFi helps you find and connect to free WiFi hotspots as well as keeping track of keys for locked and for-fee services.

If your idea of meal planning is ordering Chinese takeout, this isn’t for you. But for those of us who have wished we could look up a recipe for an item that’s on sale, Allrecipe.com’s new mobile service is just the ticket. Just type “Mobile.Allrecipes.com” into the phone’s Web browser.

Packet8 is sweetening the pot for customers, especially Virtual Office business customers, with “digital courier service” from YouSendIt.com, that makes it easy to send very large files electronically. It’s designed for files like video that can’t be sent via email, but it also works well for sending photos and large documents. I use it to send audio files of interviews to the archivist at my local library, and can attest to the ease of use.

It had to happen: iPlayboy widget for your Apple iPhone. Now do you want to buy one?

I hardly ever use instant messaging. The reason isn’t a laudable desire to avoid distractions. It’s because I simply forget to open that IM “silo.”

We’re so used to working with applications that operate like silos — email, document editing, instant messaging, media players — that we don’t notice it until someone brings it to our attention.

What’s more, for those of us who have difficulty staying focused in the best of cases, the between-applications shuffle provides endless opportunities for distraction and time wasting. For example, it’s taken me four days to finish this story.

Mill Valley, CA-based IP communications company CommuniGate wants to help me out with its newest offering, Pronto!; a browser-based user interface that brings together e-mail, instant messaging, rich media, RSS feeds, and groupware.

Sold through distributors and service providers, Pronto! can be run by a service provider as a hosted service or on-premises by an enterprise. Business and consumer subscribers can use their Pronto! desktop through any Web browser, anywhere without installing any client software.

What sets the Adobe Flash-based Pronto! apart from other unified communications and office suites is that it brings multi-media into the mix.

The system marries two of today’s hot trends: Rich Internet Applications (RIA) — aka Web 2.0 — and unified IP communications. The interactive nature of the application is important; this is not simply a Web mail program. These applications work just like the ones physically on your desktop, says CommuniGate VP of Business Development Jon Doyle, and they are designed go seamlessly with the workflow.

“If you look at the way people work, they’ll have an email client open, they’ll have a media player open, they might be using a blogging tool or working on a document,” explains Doyle. For example, Pronto! integrates your calendar and your email and lets you drag and drop video from your desktop and publish a video press release seamlessly.

Pronto! is designed for small to mid-size businesses with 20 to 200 users — the kind that don’t have the time or resources to invest in managing an in-house system like Microsoft Communicator. Pronto!’s sweet spot is with small-to-medium size legal, medical and media firms.

It’s an underserved market, according to Doyle.

“With Microsoft you have to have Exchange, Active Directory, Live Communications Server, a PBX, the Office suite,” says Doyle. In other words, lots of software and equipment to install, configure and manage.

“If you look at small companies, they don’t have an IT guy to set up Microsoft or Lotus,” he continues. “They can’t have five or six products to deal with. It might be all right for Delta Dental but not for the dentist down the street. Pronto! is technology ‘baked’ to be useful.”

The system’s secret sauce is Adobe Flash. The first reason is security, according to Doyle.

“Flash is inherently secure because it runs in memory space,” he explains. “Flash is a binary that runs in memory space within the Flash or Shockwave layer, and is far more secure. Java, AJAX, Javascript [other technologies used to build RIAs] open security holes because they can execute exploits, and thus can be used by hackers to get into the PC.

“That’s a big thing for us,” Doyle adds, “because we didn’t want to unleash a whole series of fixes.”

Easy handling for multi-media is another benefit, says Doyle. “Multi-media plays inside Flash. Ajax and Java [other technologies for building RIAs] call up a player,” he explains, “and players are a security hole. Once you let it play, it’s on your PC.”

Finally, with Flash Lite bringing RIAs to handsets, Pronto! gets to go along for the ride. “Over the next 24 months you’re going to see a lot of Flash Lite,” says Doyle. “Providers are starting to look at it for games, data applications. If you start a Java application on a cell phone,” he adds, “it’s not intuitive.”

So what’s next? First up in September will be integrated voice services; either through a CommuniGate plug-in or built in capabilities in the next version of Flash Player. After that, Doyle says, “really creative packages of software — voice messaging, SMS, email, all crafted for special uses.”

Now excuse me, I have to go open my IM program and see if any of my old friends from high school want to chat.

Looking to emulate the highly successful Asterisk ecosystem business model, IP-PBX pioneer ShoreTel has launched a partner program to extend the choice of integrated solutions available to customers.

Skype Inside: First, an agreement between Toshiba and Skype will build Skype into Toshiba notebooks. Second, German mobile software company Shape Services has launched beta versions of IM+ for Skype software for Java phones, Symbian S60 and Palm OS.

Home networking pioneer Netgear announced a new collaboration with British Ubiquisys to build a residential gateway that integrates a DSL modem, Wi-Fi, VoIP and a femtocell 3G access point. (Femtocells are being promoted for fixed-mobile convergence.) It seems like a natural progression for the company that first made it possible for the average Joe to connect to the Internet. A side benefit is that your cell phone will also work better at home.

For those of you who wish you could take your VoIP service with you when you leave home or office, Chinese manufacturer ATCOM announced a new Mini ATA AG110 that fits in your packet. The company’s website is less than helpful to the English speaker, with howlers like this: “With the powerful R&D capability, ATCOM will keep lunching all kinds of VoIP terminals and devices….” Sounds like Godzilla.

When you take your VoIP service on the road, you’re going to need a broadband connection. Boingo is helping road warriors escape being nickeled-and-dimed to death by WiFi service providers with its global, flat rate, unlimited use service. The company claims to have about 100,000 hot spots. U.S. price is about $40 a month. Earthlink and Nokia are also aiming to let travelers roam free by equipping the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet with Earthlink’s WiFi service at no charge.

Polycom’s Spectralink WiFi phones now comply with the federal government’s security specifications for ’sensitive’ — but not classified — communications. This is the first WiFi phone to achieve this, according to the press release. But it is secure enough for Vice President Strangelove?

If you’ve ever wished you had that great picture of your Maui vacation right there on your cell phone, wish no more. Glide Mobile lets you bring all your files to your phone — even documents. All for free. You’d never guess this from parent company TransMedia’s description of its business: “TransMedia is leading the emergence of rights and identity based, compatible and integrated multipurpose software and services for corporations and consumers.” Huh? Anyway, you can read Glide Mobile’s press release here. (It’s not on the website — go figure.)

With only 2 days left until “i” Day, Ajax software company Backbase is prepping its Ajax framework and developers kit for the Apple Safari 3 browser, Apple’s chosen avenue for value-added applications. Backbase says that its framework will run on the Apple iPhone without modification. You can give it a test run here.

And speaking of tech’s Cabbage Patch Kid, how many people are actually planning to buy one? Not many, according to an online survey at the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. As of this writing, only five percent of the people taking the survey say they’re going to buy one “immediately.” At the other end of the spectrum, 16 percent say they will “never” buy one, 11 percent say “not as long as it’s tied to AT&T for service,” and 27 percent — the largest cohort — say “not while it’s so much more expensive than other options.” You can weigh in here.

P.S. Gartner says the iPhone doesn’t belong in the enterprise.

Linksys announced the end of the SPA941/SPA942 four line upgrade license.

Starting with firmware version 5.1.10 for the SPA942 and firmware version 5.1.8 for the SPA941, the SPA94X series phones will automatically enable the ability to configure up to four unique extensions per phone.