The iPhone Plunge

Last Friday Dianne and I got up early and headed to the Apple Store in the Kenwood Towne Centre to try and get the new iPhone. We got there just after 7 and there was a long line already forming. While Dianne waited in line at the Apple Store, I went to check out the AT&T kiosk. When we walked past the kiosk there was hardly anyone waiting there. I found out the line was short because the AT&T kiosk only had 20 units – 10 of the 8 Gb phones and 10 of the 16 Gb phones. I left the kiosk line and rejoined Dianne. We were 83rd and 84th in line.

The wait wasn’t too bad. We were talking with folks in line and the Apple store was providing coffee and water for everyone. A guy next to us had arrived about 1 in the morning, but couldn’t get in the mall to get in line until the doors opened. Unfortunately there was some confusion about which mall doors should open first and he happened to be at an entrance that opened later. As a result, he ended up in line near us and was way behind folks that arrived later. It’s too bad they didn’t issue numbers to keep it fair.

The store opened at 8 and we were in the store about 9:30ish. The salesperson talked to us for a bit, found out what we needed, and started to process our purchase. He had to do them one at a time. My purchase went through right away. I was handed off to an activation specialist to register my phone and activate it via the Apple iTunes store. That didn’t work. The iTunes store was overwhelmed with requests and they couldn’t activate it as advertised, so I was given instructions on how to do it at home. I went to see if Dianne was done with her purchase, but the salesperson had barely made any progress since the AT&T server connection went down! Yikes! It took about 30 minutes to get through and purchase her phone. At least we got them!

We had our phones registered in the early afternoon and were checking out the features. The portable email and web browsing are pretty cool. The GPS with traffic reports will be handy. Overall, an amazing product so far and a huge improvement over our LG phones we had through Verizon.

The only thing that has been disappointing is the MobileMe service. We’ve experienced a lot of server delays and synchronization issues that really shouldn’t happen with an Apple product. Usually things happen like magic, but this service has taken quite a bit of fiddling to get set up. Hopefully they’ll get their act together soon.