Googling (oops, pardon, searching Google I mean) for iPhone just now yields “about 76,100,000” hits. Wow. Just goes to show how Steve Jobs has perfected the art of letting the press do Apple’s marketing at very little cost.

As a stockholder, I’m all for it. By all accounts, the iPhone, which goes on sale the day after tomorrow, will sell very well, and AAPL stock has already gone up 50% this year. As a cellphone non-user I don’t care; it’ll take a long time to be sold here in Brazil, and even if it were on sale tomorrow, I wouldn’t buy one for my daily use. As I said before, a “OS X”-based tablet would be more interesting.

But speaking of OS X, I wonder what version will be installed on the iPhone. The TV seems to run a special build of version 10.4.7, by all accounts. Originally I’d expected the iPhone to run a stripped-down version of 10.5 (Leopard), but now that Leopard has been delayed, that’s no longer plausible. How Apple will manage the whole Mac OS X – OS X dichotomy still remains a mistery… no doubt we’ll have detailed dissections of the iPhone contents next Saturday.