iPhones in Space

I was at the Weird Al concert and someone a few rows in front of me had his new iPhone out. I started to wonder if an iPhone might work in space, aside from the fact that it's way outside the service area, or would the electronics fry in the solar wind?

A decade or two back we had to be very careful with our orbiting electronics because the radiation from the sun would fry things. Even now we have to power down a lot of our satellites during periods of intense solar activity. You may remember stories about sun spots messing with TV reception back when everyone used antennas. It's even been suggested that they were partially responsible for the big blackout across the American north east a few years back.

The reason I ask this question is because the iPhone is so powerful. It's practically a whole computer. My PalmPilot is more powerful than what went to the moon. The iPhone isn't on par with my Macintosh G5, but it seems to be competitive with the MacMini except no CD-ROM, keyboard, or monitor.

I'm still working up to something here. Hang on.

My PalmPilot has all kinds of attachments available to it. There used to be a modem you can clip onto the bottom, I've got a wi-fi card for mine, there's GPS attachments, barcode scanners, infrared keyboards, cameras, microphones, solar rechargers, etc.

Now imagine being able to do the same thing with an iPhone. Clip on some microthrusters and some solar panels and you have a satellite. Clip on a better camera and it's a spy satellite. Clip on an infrared camera and it's a weather satellite.
Got a deep space probe? Why build a whole new computer for it? Build your satellite and then pop in an iPhone as it's brain.
You could send up a constellation of seven small satellites. Six surrounding one. Each within wi-fi range of three others. The one in the middle could have the sat-phone attachment so that it could just dial back to NASA using the Iridium satellites instead of needing a big radio dish.

Once enough old satellites got replaced with this new brain then they'd be able to talk with other nearby satellites in orbit. It's pretty crowded up there and collisions need to be watched out for. They'd be able to communicate and negotiate the slight changes in orbit they need to miss each other.

I'm only really using the iPhone as an example because that's what gave me the idea. And there's already a manufacturer for it. But if NASA (or Boeing or Lockheed-Martin or...) could develop one multi-purpose satellite brain that could be used just dropped into whatever needs it I think they'd save a lot of time, effort, and money. Clip on the attachment, install the software, chuck it out the back of a Space Shuttle.