iDay

Alas, it is iDay. Okay, it's the day after iDay, but I haven't set my iPhone down long enough to eat, sleep or blog. The line at the AT&T store was comfortable—cool weather if a little bit damp—and the folks waiting with us were a delight to hang out with for 3.5 hours. Even the store manager came out to check on us once in a while. Tobias and I were numbers seven and eight in line (although not in that order). One guy actually arrived at midnight—which is no big thing for people in NY, but Athens it's hard core.


Thanks to DiGi for the above two pics of us waiting in line. He kindly came by to gawk at us. We were in and out of the store with our sealed orange AT&T bags (love that color) in something like 10 minutes. It actually felt shorter.


Activation at home was pretty simple (although it required a hasty upgrade to 10.4.10 and iTunes 7.3). Unfortunately the actual activation took hours (still waiting to be able to make and receive calls). The good part is that they'll email you when it's ready, so you don't have to sit at you computer and stare (although I did for a while). The other down side is that the phone won't do anything until activation is complete, so I couldn't sit by my 15-inch PowerBook watching movies on the iPhone's 3.5-inch display while I waited.

But this morning I awoke to a beautifully activated iPhone, and it's every bit as wonderful as the hype (sans the phone part which isn't active yet—BTW, that's because I did a number transfer—but who needs to make phone calls anyway). It quickly connected to my Wi-fi network where I proceeded to watch that YouTube video of the skateboarding dog, check my email (again sitting next to my PowerBook) and try out all of the other fun apps and features.

So far, my only big complaint is that the headphone jack is recessed, making it nearly impossible to plug in anything but the Apple-provided headphones (which are great btw). The trouble is that I want to listen to music in my car with the tape-deck adapter, but the plug won't fit. I'm sure someone will make an adapter, but they shouldn't have to adapt a STANDARD headphone jack. This reminds me of my old Compaq laptop (another life ago) that I couldn't plug most pen-drives into because the USB ports were surrounded by the moulded plastic of the laptop. Surely we've come a ways in device design since then.

I think I'm going to use it's built-in camera to take photos of my cat now.