So I purchased an iPhone yesterday. All things considered, I ended up pretty lucky in getting it. I was going by the AT&T store anyhow to meet someone that wanted to buy my Blackjack (which I decomissioned a little over a month ago). Anyhow, the line had started forming, and the store was closed until 6pm when the iPhone’s went on sale. I got there around 5:45 or so. So I decided to go ahead and wait in line since I needed to get in the store to get to the guy wanting to buy my Blackjack. I only had to wait in line for about 30 minutes total. When I got in, I took a quick look and decided to go ahead and purchase the 8GB model.

I’ve been playing with it ever since and for the most part, I am very pleased with it. I don’t quite buy into the whole “this is going to change the way everyone thinks about mobile phones.” Sorry, but it’s a VERY nice phone/ipod/browser in my opinion. I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly see a flurry of providers sending people home to activate their phones or anything like that. I was lucky in that my phone activated instantly, unlike some other reports I’ve read of people waiting for a few hours for activation (my guess is AT&T/Apple got swamped with activation requests).

Some of the features I’ll comment on:

• Keyboard: It’s definitely nice, and a LOT better then I expected. I am able to comfortably use it for typing URL’s, SMS, and brief emails. So I am impressed … but … it is not going to replace physical “thumb” QWERTY keyboards. If you are proficient (and by proficient I mean you type with both thumbs and can look away from the keyboard without making massive mistakes) with a thumb keyboard, you will be slower at data entry on this. What they say about “trusting” it is true. You need to just type away and let it figure it out, it is extremely smart. But typing with one finger is just slower then going with both thumbs, no doubt about it.
• Browser: This is definitely something that sets it aside from any other mobile device. Having a real browser on the phone is so nice. You can comfortably read websites like CNN, blogs, etc. I actually hope that bloggers/sites do NOT try to release special iPhone themes for their sites. It would be an injustice to the browser on the iPhone. I was out with friends last night and folks started having various side conversations and I started playing around with it and before I knew it, I had cleared out my unread items in Google Reader. It was completely comfortable to do. My eyes didn’t feel strained and navigation was nearly flawless.
• Phone: It’s a pretty good phone. The sound quality is decent, getting the keypad up and working with it is easy enough. iTunes sync’s all of your contacts over from your Address Book on your Mac, so I was able to easily have all of my contacts available.
• SMS: It uses the “conversation” style txt messaging, sort of like BlackBerry’s. So you can easily carry on txt conversations with multiple people and not get totally lost in the conversations (I txt a lot, so this is great to find out).
• Google Maps: As many people have already said, this is quite possibly better then Google Maps itself. It is actually one of the applications I’ve been using to show off the iPhone to friends and none of them have not said “Wow” and left their jaw open after seeing it.
• WiFi: It reliably picks up my secured home network, so in the apartment I can easily browse, taking advantage of my broadband speeds. If I’m out and it senses a network, it asks me if I’d like to join it instead of using EDGE.
• EDGE: I really haven’t had problems with the speed. It’s not as fast as browsing at home on my computer over broadband, but I would not call it painful by any means. I wouldn’t have expected it to be as fast as my home computer browsing either.
• Voicemail: This is really nice. When a voicemail is left for you, it evidently gets downloaded to your phone or something along those lines. You can just click listen and the voicemail instantly starts playing. There’s no need to dial in to voicemail.

Anyhow, I’ll try to do a follow up post after I’ve had some more time to play with it some more as I did with the Blackjack. I will mention a nitpick I just found out this morning however …

I went to get in my car, where I have a setup for an FM transmitter that I use with my regular iPod. It’s not one of the iTrip things that relies on sitting flush against the top of the iPod. My transmitter basically plugs in like a set of headphones would. I’m not sure if part of the plug is too fat to let the pin go far enough in or what, but regardless, I couldn’t get it to play music with my FM transmitter, instead it defaulted to playing with the iPhone’s built-in speaker, which is obviously unacceptable for listening to music in your car. So it looks like I will be looking for some other means of playing music in my car if I don’t want to carry my regular iPod.

Anyhow, that’s all for now. And yes, Pat, I know I’m a lamer.