iPhone – the apparently perennial slow news-day space-filler always seems to invite further speculation. It’s easy to witter about how Apple might have a new wonder product hidden up their sleeve, but no-one seems to move the argument forward.

The reasoning why the iPhone might be great is based on the seamless experience of iTunes and the iPod, but if you consider another of Apple’s products .Mac – and from Rui’s step by step critique you can see that Apple aren’t exactly excelling with this product.

What interests me most about Rui’s coverage is not the mainstream woes for Mac users – insecurity, synching problems, speed, standards avoidence, and general cruft – but the great potential for mobile integration, he notes a handful of areas where .Mac isn’t as good as it could be or where mobile oriented features would fit very nicely, such as IMAP IDLE support, addressbook and calendar synching with SyncML, and moblogging to take advantage of the Mac’s native support for 3gpp standards. All laudable additions, and not that hard to sort out.

So back to the mythical iPhone, is it coming soon? That’s hard to say, but perhaps we should look at the state of .Mac’s phone oriented features as a significant pointer as to when the iPhone will appear.