« *boop* *bloop* *bleep*! Waaalllllleeeee.... | Main | Now and Then, Here and There »

Same Ol' Song & Dance

Early Morning Clouds

Got up bright and early this morning at 6am for the Apple iPhone 3G launch. Was thinking that I had probably gotten up too early but figured I'd go and drop by the local AT&T store for a look. Got there a little before 6:30 and there was already 20+ people in line. Was prepared for the wait with my trusty ol' PSP. Thank god the weather had turned super nice the past few days instead of massively humid as it was early in the week. Still, by the time 9am rolled around the sun was beating down on our backs like crazy. Or maybe it was just cause we'd been lounging around out in the sun for 2 and a half hours already.

By the time I was ready to enter the store, we already knew that the 16GB models were sold out (which means this particular store only had ~20 16GB units to start with) so I was resigned to picking up an 8GB. They were taking orders for the 16GB for delivery in 7-10 days though. If there is one good thing I can say about the painfully slow purchase and activation procedure, it's that it helped me get the 16GB that I had intended. This particular AT&T store had more employees on hand than computer terminals so the employee helping me and I were just standing around waiting for a computer to open up when I watched a FedEx guy stroll in with a hand truck full of boxes. They were taken into the back room and I asked my guy to check if they happened to be more iPhones. And they were. Bunch of black and white 16GBs. So I was much more psyched than I was just a few minutes ago. Incidentally, the white iPhones look really nice.

After I paid for my new phone and service, I had to waste another 40 minutes hanging around while my guy tried to find a computer that could actually activate the phone. To no avail. By this time the Apple servers handling the activations through iTunes had presumably crashed so nothing was going through. Company policy was that all iPhones had to be activated in store before leaving the premises but since that was no longer possible, they just gave us our iBricks and told us to try to activate them ourselves.

So I stepped out of the store at a little after 10am, 3 and a half hours later. It took another 4 hours before my phone finally activated and sync'ed up with my iTunes. My first impression: "Mm, it's an iPhone." ;-p Not really a massive change from the original. The glossy plastic back is just begging for a case and I hope CoZip comes out with their polycarbonate back case soon for the 3G. The side buttons are now much easier to detect by feel and the speakers do sound louder and no longer seem completely muffled if you hold the iPhone at the bottom.

iPhone 3G

Nothing majorly different with the new 2.0 OS either (besides the ability to purchase/download and install new apps. Haven't gotten around to really digging into the App Store and checking them out yet but a few standouts that I've noticed so far include Remote, midomi, Twitterrific and Exposure. Is 3G that much faster than EDGE? As far as I can tell with the limited testing I've done today, it does seem faster but I'm not 100% certain on how appreciably faster it may be. I'll probably have a better feel for it after a few days of regular commute use. GPS functionality makes location mapping much more accurate now obviously but I haven't but it through its paces yet either. Oh, but being able to geotag your iPhone photos is pretty cool.

Apple's new MobileMe service was finally up (sorta) this afternoon as well so being a long time .Mac member, I set up the push sync'ing for email, contacts and calendar. First notable thing it did was wipe out all my contacts that were already in the phone so I was contact-less for an hour or so before MobileMe finally figured out that it should start sync'ing stuff between my MobileMe account and my iPhone.

So was it worth it? Jury's still out as far as I'm concerned. I still need to call up AT&T customer service to see if I can somehow rejigger my iPhone account and Erin's normal account into one family plan again like it was with the original iPhone. Right now I'm signed up for the lowest priced individual iPhone 3G plan. Considering I had sold my original iPhone last month for more than the subsidized cost for the iPhone 3G, it didn't really hurt to upgrade as far as the phone's up-front cost is concerned. Anyway, as I've only had this thing for a day there's still a lot more futzing around to be done. I'll post more impressions in the upcoming days/weeks if I remember to. ;-p

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.hitokiri.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1481

Post a comment

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 11, 2008 11:20 PM.

The previous post in this blog was *boop* *bloop* *bleep*! Waaalllllleeeee.....

The next post in this blog is Now and Then, Here and There.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Subscribe

 

Add to Google Reader or Homepage
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.