It sure doesn't have to appeal to business to be successful. If considered with the rest of the smartphones it could easily expand that market, enticing people to plunk down the $500-600 when they would normally only drop 100 bucks or less on the phone, though let's not forget the couple hundred on the iPod as well.

It's almost more like getting a crazy high-end iPod with a crippled amount of storage and the added bonus of the phone features. The screen and interface makes all that possible. Other iPods have actually synced calendar and contacts for a couple years. They also play video. But they don't do that on a really big screen that allows you to interact better with it all. And oh, yeah, we throw in the phone part.

So it's a consumer-ish device, but that doesn't stop people hoping they'll be able to use it for business because interfaces on a lot of those smartphones that do the business stuff (sync to Exchange, etc.) still kinda suck. It won't be much good for business unless a) it can sync to the business email people need and b) the keyboard works okay. Consumer users won't care as much about the keyboard. They'll just deal with it. Somewhere in between is a smaller business user/sole prop consultant or something that doesn't have that big corp email structure to worry about, and this may work fine for them as well, should they want to drop the 500 bucks on it.

Any IMAP email is going to work and be configurable to sync often enough to resemble push, I would think, based on the info I've seen. IMAP can sync email both ways, so that covers email, assuming the server can do IMAP. (Even Exchange servers could, but it's often turned off.) What may be missing that I see is OTA sync of calendar and contacts. It'll sync those with a computer, and it'll sync address book with Yahoo, but there's a gap of info as to what else might be sync-able.