Two Fridays ago I spent the day in my cube watching all the iPhone hype pile up in Google Reader from all across the interweb. I had told myself that I wasn’t going to buy right away. “It’s $600. You just bought a house, and a motorcycle. You don’t need a new phone. Your SonyEricsson w800i is a great phone.” These were all the arguments I kept repeating my in head through out the day. They were still going as I found myself driving through the parking lot of the local AT&T store around 5 o’clock in the afternoon.
The line was about 40 people deep, so I told myself there was no reason to wait. Just go home and forget about it, read the reviews on Monday, and decide then. After I got back to the house I sat around for about 15 minutes until my roommate came home. He wanted to go get some dinner, so I coincidentally suggested that we could grab a bite to eat at the Green Mill Restaurant near the mall, which just happened to be by the AT&T store I had been at, and the mall also happened to house one of the three Apple stores in the metro Minneapolis area. Looking back I think I’d already decided that I was going to by the phone, I mean I did grab my platinum MasterCard before I left to go to dinner. I really didn’t need all that purchasing power for just a pizza.
I talked Dan into letting me swing by the AT&T store to check the line. I just wanted to look at it I told him. When we got to the store around 7-ish, there was no line. We walked right in, and within 5 minutes I had the phone in my hand. It was a masterpiece of electronic design, I had to have one. “Give me the 8 gig one.” I heard the words, and then realized that I had actually said them. They were out of the 8GB model. Saved (or thwarted) from impulsively dropping $600, we left the store and drove over to the restaurant.
Since Green Mill is actually attached to the mall, we parked and went and sat down in the bar. Our friendly bartender informed us that if we waited 20 minutes, that there would be free pizza for reverse happy hour. I sat there sipping on a beer distractedly talking to Dan, all the while I kept thinking that if I didn’t like the phone I could bring it back and only be out the restocking fee. I could use it for 14 days, and see if it lived up to all the hype. It’d be roughly a $100 test drive, it was the perfect plan, even more perfectly justifiable. I told Dan I was just going to check on the line at the Apple Store and see how bad it was. There was no line. I walked in, and 5 minutes later I walked out carrying an 8GB iPhone in a cute bag that in some cities would’ve probably made me a target for mugging.
The whole thing proved to be quite a painless transaction. I didn’t even leave with a receipt, in a effort to improve iDay efficiency the Apple Store emailed me a .pdf of the receipt to the account I already have on file with them. I did have to wait a couple of hours to get the phone activated, but I was surfing the web from the iPhone by midnight, and I didn’t have to stand in line all day.
I’m not going to go in depth about the features, etc… since several bloggers who are far more talented and insightful than me have done a much better job than I ever could.
What I will say is that it has taken me a bit longer than average to get adept at the virtual keyboard, which I still don’t like a lot, but since the lack of a real keyboard makes the thing so damn sexy, it’s not bothering me as much as it might normally. I really dislike the fact that I can’t use my sleek sup’d up noise-canceling headphones without an adapter, but thanks to a tip found on Daring Fireball I have an Ebay’d solution coming to me in the mail as you read this. But my expensive Monster iPod FM transmitter doesn’t work with the iPhone, so right now I don’t have a way to listen to it in the car. The biggest problem I have with it right now, is that it doesn’t do MMS messages. I can’t send or receive pictures on it. This is almost a deal breaker for me. Since I got my w800i last year, the majority of the photos I’ve posted to my Flickr account have been from the cameraphone. While posting to flickr.com isn’t really the issue, since that’s a simple email, the quality of the camera, and its lack of flash is. It’s not that the iPhone’s camera is bad, in my opinion it looks great if there’s enough light, but now I can’t simply snap a photo and text it to someone, and that really irritates me. Sure I can send an email with the photo to their number@theircarrier.com, but who knows all of their friends carriers?
Will it heal the sick and and feed the hungry like a good JesusPhone should? No. Is it the second coming of the Mobile Phone? No. Is it an incredible smart phone and the closest thing to having an All-In-One personal communicator device that I’ve ever played with? Yes. Will I take it back on Friday? Come on, just try and take it from me, come on.
I like 
