Quite honestly, I never intended to buy an iPhone on launch day. In fact, since I'm a Verizon customer with six more months on my contract, I planned on waiting until the holiday season before thinking about buying an iPhone. I figured that would give plenty of time for the kinks to be worked out of the phone and the AT&T service. So I found myself in line at the local AT&T Wireless store at 5:15PM on Friday, succumbed to the hype.

I figured I'd have a decent shot to get one since I live in a less metro city. When I arrived at the store there were about 65 people in line. I kind of laughed to myself as I made the embarrassing walk to the back of the line. I've never waited in line for a product launch and I couldn't believe I was doing it. Yada, yada, yada... 2.5 hours later I'm in the store buying the 8GB model with no accessories. Get the hardware and get out... that was the plan.

With sore legs, feet and back I made it home, took the box out of the bag and plopped it on my desk for the experience that is an Apple product unboxing. As expected, the packaging was brilliant. I slid the top of the box off and the angels sang. The iPhone was revealed in it's serene, lifeless state complete with halo and beams of sunshine. Okay, not really but whatever.

I lifted the phone out of the plastic holder and my first impression was, "Damn! This thing is heavy. No way I'm going to hold this up to my ear." I pulled the dock and cables out and plugged it into my MacBook Pro. iTunes launched, immediately found the iPhone and was ready to step me through the activation process.

So far, it's an Apple experience. And then... AT&T! Ugh. My first issue with activating the phone was that I was not able to port my existing phone number. At first I was bummed, but I've been thinking it's time for a phone number change anyway so I proceeded to get a new number. The next issue I had was with the pre-approved credit code that was given to me by the sales guy at the store. iTunes was expecting a 9, 11 or 13-digit number. I had a 14-digit number. So I had to leave that field blank, which immediately made me uncomfortable because that meant I had to get my credit checked a second time in less than an hour. So I proceeded and iTunes told me it needed about three minutes to activate. Hahaha! Not so much.

After three minutes or so, iTunes came back with a message that my account would need more time to activate and I would receive an email when the phone was activated. Okay great.

30 minutes went by...

1 hour went by...

Still no email. So I started searching the Apple Support site to see if people were having similar issues. They were. Some were saying their phones were activated immediately and others were in the exact same boat as me. So I decided to just wait and see what happened.

Three hours later I decided I would call the AT&T 877 number displayed in iTunes. The voice message said something to the affect of, "We're experiencing technical difficulties and are unable to take your call." Yes! Just how I wanted this to go. A new phone carrier who can't even get their own phone system working.

I waited another hour and then called back. This time I got a real human on the phone. But unfortunately it might as well have been a dog because she was just as useful in helping me. She shuffled me to the sales department. And then I was shuffled to the sales support department. Finally, I arrived at Apple support!?! What in the hell is going on? I told the Apple representative that this was not an iPhone issue and he tried to be helpful, but he couldn't do anything.

I gave up around 12:45AM and went to bed hoping it would be activated in the morning.

I woke up fairly anxious to see if my new $600 phone, which has been working flawlessly as a statue, was activated. I had no emails in my inbox, so I was immediately expecting the worst. I decided to turn off the phone and turn it back on and holy crap, it was activated!

iTunes popped up and syncronization started. From that moment forward it has been a total Apple experience. The sync, the phone, everything is working as advertised. After searching around my mail, I finally found the AT&T emails trapped in my AOL spam folder (which, by the way, doesn't go to your Junk Mail folder in Mail.app -- that caught me totally off-guard -- and yes I've had an AOL email address since 1994 or something so sue me). The phone was activated around 4:30AM this morning. So I'm glad I didn't wait.

The phone is rad. I've been playing with it all day. I'll post some thoughts as I uncover or discover stuff or encounter issues, but for now here are some initial feelings:

• The keyboard is a little strange at first, but if you trust it, it works fairly well. The word suggestion is very nice.
• My WiFi network was found immediately and connected without issues.
  
• I was shocked to find my 3rd party iPod headphones do not fit the plug! I have a pair of Sony MDR-EX71 and Shure EC2 (I think that's the model). I ended up shaving down the Sony pair and it works. Of course I lose the built-in microphone on the iPod headphones, but it's worth it for the comfort for now.
• The finger gestures and the responsiveness to said gestures is much better than I anticipated. The phone reacts quickly and accurately.
• The screen is brilliant and with the brightness set halfway it is amazing.
• The iPod functionality is awesome. CoverFlow is nice.
• Google Maps is amazing.
• Safari is cool, but a little clunky. I was able to post to my blog from it, which is heavily AJAXed so that's good news.
• SMS is iChat-like which is a really nice way to communicate.
• YouTube is pretty cool. I watched a few Muse videos and they looked good but sounded horrible.
• Mail is mail. It's about as good as it can get I suppose?
• Making phone calls and receiving phone calls is flawless. Very nice touch fading out/in music when you get a call. The voice quality is very good. Much better than my RAZR. Holding the phone to my ear is not entirely comfortable, but it is better than the RAZR.