Flibbertigibbet

I also bought one on Friday. It is HOT. Period. I don't know what that guy meant by fussy dialing. It's incredible.

I'll start with the negatives so far. As expected, using the internet when only using AT&T and not a wifi connection, it is maddening slow. NYC might be faster but here in DC it takes an estimated full minute to pull up any particular webpage depending on how good your service is. But I never had internet on my phone before and I will say when it loads the page the functionality of scrolling, enlarging and what not is amazing. And if you're a lucky person who lives near a lot of hot spots or even in a city that offers free wifi, then you have no issues.

The text messaging is hot because it looks like a conversation on iChat. And the keyboard is awesome. At first you worry and try to be super accurate hitting the letters but when Apple says "trust the keyboard" they mean it. I can fly on it now, though if you have big fingers, that might be an issue.

They have a feature to set up your mail accounts and I use gmail so you just click gmail, log in and from then on it will periodically (every 15 mins for me) check my gmail and let me know if I have new email. Because they built that out separately from just going to gmail.com on the browser it is much faster, even when not on wifi.

The Youtube feature is cool if you love YouTube but they have not yet uploaded all of their videos for you to be able to see. But they do have the dramatic chipmunk so that's made me very happy. Obviously the video on the phone is impeccable. I don't download many videos on iTunes but do have the SNL sketches with Jake Gyllenhaal in them and I love being able to see his beautiful face now wherever I am. :) The ipod is an ipod - no real new exciting things with that. The touchscreen scrolling is fun.

I even got to use the Google Maps feature to look up a number for a store for my friend. I searched, it showed me all locations for that store in DC and I hit "list" and it lists them. I click on the one I want, it pulls up the info on that store, I click the phone number and it automatically dials it. Amazing. Love it.

My favorite thing, which is kind of stupid but I thought so cool, was that if you are on a call, the screen goes dark to save battery and when you pull the phone away from your face it automatically lights up and asks if you want to end the call. It knows you're done talking. And not because the other person hung up first. I tested it. I don't know how they do it unless it's a motion sensor of some sort but it's awesome.

Well so far so good. 3 days in and loving it. I have to now call Verizon and pay them $175 to end my contract. Oye. I feel bad, I love Verizon's service, but I just could not resist this phone. Two of my friends who swore they weren't going to buy one went out after playing with mine and bought them.

Great. Now I'm scared to go near them lest I find myself unable to resist and spend $600 to buy it and then another $200-ish to cancel my Verizon account.

I really want to hold off until January. I hope by then that the second generation version is available.

Thanks for the review! I'm so excited about it!

Well I have heard mixed reviews on when the second version would be out. Most people say no way by January b/c Apple is going to be focused on getting their new O/S out in the fall which was delayed because of the iPhone release this week. I have also heard they will definitely be out ASAP b/c they want to release the phone in Europe and the EDGE technology will never fly in Europe so they need to get the 3G version up and running. It would just really shock me if they release a new one in six months. That will piss so many people off who bought it now. Though I rationalized it in that if they do, I will simply post mine on craigslist and sell it and go buy a new one since I know I will want the 3G instead of EDGE. But who knows, I might find that I don't use Safari a lot outside of wifi areas and might not be a big deal to me. Since the gmail functionality is so easy and fast, I don't know that the browser being slow will bother me as much as I expected it would. I also figure the next version will have a larger hard drive option so I can at that time replace my iPod as well and so between selling both the old iPhone and my iPod, I can afford to buy a new one.

I would stay away though - they are too pretty. :)

Yes! Stay AWAY from the Apple store! I went into several AT&T and Apple stores many times to play with it, and each time I almost walked away with one! The only reason I didn't walk away broke is that they were sold out. :-P

The touchscreen is just gorgeous--very sharp, very large, and very responsive. And of course, the user interface is actually fun! I loved playing with it with my fingers--scrolling, zooming in and out, viewing the photos and albums, and of course web surfing. The iPhone is slimmer and lighter than I thought it would be, and its much prettier on your own hand than in the pictures. :)

BTW, Apple stocked its own stores with several thousands per day while shorting AT&T stores. Shipments to Apple stores also arrived daily over the weekend so that Apple stores didn't sold out until the end of each day. Of course, the only iPhones that were left by the afternoon were the 4GB versions, which few wanted to buy (as I noticed from my visits).

The only major issue I read about was the activation process--particular with people who were transferring their phone numbers or moving from another carrier. Many waited for several hours to even a couple of days before their iPhones were activated. I can imagine some parts of the AT&T network were overwhelmed by 500,000 iPhone activations in just three days. Still, AT&T should have been prepared for this.

They also said nearly 50% of those 500K purchases were from non-AT&T customers so there is a lot of porting going on. I just got a new number and called it a day and my activation took less than 30 mins.

However, last night and this morning, my screen has frozen on me and become unresponsive and I have to reboot the phone to get it to work. I'm charging it now hoping that will maybe resolve it but if not, it will be going back to Apple this weekend. I'm not too worried about it, but I am taking no chances.