It’s here at last. After all the hype and the raves from across the Pond, Britain is to be let into the iPhone secret tomorrow, Friday, at 2 minutes past 6pm on the dot.

As forecast here in Syntagma, the contract has gone to former BT-owned — now Telefonica-owned — mobile giant, O2. They seem to have paid through the nose for the privilege.

The 8GB iPhone comes in at a whopping £269 ($565), way above the new lower price in the States. But there’s more to pay : you have to take out an 18-month contract with O2 costing £630 ($1,323). That’s a commitment of $1,888 just to get you into a locked-in deal.

On those terms, you would normally get the handset free. BT is offering a free BlackBerry at under £40 a month — $84. The Vodaphone deal is £5 cheaper still.

So are we Brits going to buy this? A couple of weeks ago I wrote that we have a new Apple store opening here in Exeter, the capital of distant Devon. Here’s how it looked yesterday :

I doubt they’re going to get that open by tomorrow. And even so, my instinct is that we’re not going to pay a Spanish telco that kind of money for gimmicky technology that just does what can be got elsewhere at a fraction of the price.

My brilliant Sony Ericsson does the MP3 bit, has the same camera, logs on to the internet and even takes phone calls. The only thing missing is the touch screen.

Am I going to pay nearly $2000 for a touch screen? Do I have to answer that?

It’s also known to be slow accessing the internet (no 3G yet) and has to be sent back to change the battery. Yikes, talk about built-in obsolescence.

Message to Steve Jobs — Apple CEO
Steve, it may be a great piece of kit, but it’s a novelty product that will appeal to a small audience here with more money than sense.

Those of us who like a bit of bang for our buck will avoid this pretty bauble. You should not have asked for such a large slice of the action from O2, and they should not have premiumed up the device so far.

I’m afraid this is going to be one massive turkey here in the UK.

I like to post a serious, reflective piece on Sundays, so today I’m going to write about my discovery of the first machine-washable cellphone.

Incidentally, I never use the term “mobile” phone because they’re not actually mobile — they don’t have wheels or wings. They are in fact “portable” phones, but nobody would know what I was talking about, so I’ll settle for the American “cell” instead. Actually, that’s what they were called in Britain before “mobile” became standard, so don’t think I’ve gone all transatlantic.

The trouble with summer is that the drastic reduction in the amount of clothing worn means that objects get put in unusual places. Last week I went on a long, sticky walk in the heat with my nearly-new Motorola cellphone in a shirt breast pocket. When I got back I took the shirt off and put it straight into the washing machine and switched it on.

An hour later I was passing the laundry room only to be assailed by an ominous clanking sound as the machine went into top spin mode. A vision of the phone leapt into my mind’s eye.

I hastily retrieved the now very shiny object from the tangle of damp clothing and found it was totally dead. Being an optimist I opened the clamshell and left it in the sun to dry out.

Two days later it was still dead. I’d been using my old Model-T Ford phone for two days and was ready to take a decision to buy a new one.

A couple of hours later, I returned with a brilliant Sony-Ericsson portable phone. It had cost me a heavily-discounted £105 ($210), so I was pleased.

I was about to throw the nearly-new, bedraggled phone away when I decided to check it one more time. In the process, I wiped over the battery terminals, which were suspiciously cloudy, and turned it on. Hey presto, it jumped into life as if nothing had happened. It was like a corpse leaping out of a coffin in the rudest of health.

So now I’ve got two new phones and never know which one to use.

I doubt though that phone salespeople will be persuaded to use the line : “It’s completely machine-washable, Sir/Madam, and comes up like new time and time again. In fact, it’s superior to cotton, wool and polyester. We recommend Daz washing powder for the brightest wash.”

Well done Motorola. Hello Moto!