Day One with the iPhone

After standing in line for two hours, not bad really, The George has come home to a cold glass of white wine and blogs about his new toy . . . er productivity device.

I got an iPhone 3G folks! After considerable delay. I waited until Sunday. Two days after the worldwide launch. I left early in the morning to stand in line in front of the Apple Store at The Grove. The line was very tame. It wasn't as crowded as Friday or Saturday. Some people I met had stood in line on Friday since 5 in the morning, disappointingly going home after the activation servers were shut down. The people were really nice both in line and inside the store. The Apple Employees handed out water bottles. I was surprised the 16GB "white" iPhones were still in stock. I worried that they would be the first to go.

After going through the activation. I turned on the phone and found the controls very easy to understand and sent an SMS text to the iPhone from my Verizon Blackberry. Which I am keeping by the way.

Why? The iPhone is the new . . . .

No it's not, actually AT&T has one of the weakest signals in Los Angeles. One of the reasons I did not make the jump to the iPhone a year ago. I can't make a phone call from inside the house, and the first generation iPhones had a notorious reputation for dropped calls. As a test I had my girlfriend call her mother, a 1st Generation iPhone user. The call went through while she and I were sitting on the porch. However, when we tried to order food, I could not get a signal inside the house. As a phone the iPhone is just not there yet, because AT&T has such poor service in Los Angeles. Verizon has the best service in Los Angeles so as far a phone goes, Verizion is my first choice.

But wait! Why did you get the iPhone, if you already have a phone?

The iPhone is as fast, if not faster than the Dell XPS M1530 Laptop we have inside the house. When you connect the iPhone to a WiFi wireless network you can really appreciate the elegance of the Operating System. Now if I could only have Mozilla and Flash on the iPhone I would near use this Dell XPS again, except for Warcraft. Ooh Warcraft on the iPhone!