Well, if you followed my Twitter feed or Facebook status yesterday, you'd know that it was a long day. I dropped Anna off at her daycamp, took the day off, and thought I'd go get a phone, head over to get a haircut, have lunch with Jamie, etc. I knew there would be a line, and I knew they were talking about 10 minutes per customer, but I had heard that each store would have the capacity to sell around 30 at a time (which was not true, more like 8 at a time.)

So I got in line at 8:45 a.m., and I was about 100 people back from the front of the line. For the first 2 hours, the line didn't move at all. I'm a little disappointed in Apple. They knew this launch was coming and yet they were totally unprepared with the activation system. By 11 or so, a guy who got in line at 6am got his phone. Totally ridiculous. After what happened with the original launch, you'd think that Steve Jobs would have blown a fuse and made sure they were ready this time.

At any rate, I spent SEVEN hours in line to get my iPhone 3G. My friend Paul called and asked if I wanted lunch. He came all the way out from PDS to bring me some Chick-Fil-A. Very cool. By 12:30, people were starting to get hot, hungry and cranky, and that gave me what I needed to make it through.

So... what about the phone:

This guy covers that in detail. Beyond that, I'll add that the battery life is going to be more of an issue with this phone. I'll probably have my car charger out a lot more often than I did with the original. I'm pleased with the 3G internet so far, and the app store rocks. I've gotten a couple of paid apps, Super Monkey Ball and OmniFocus. I love that you can redownload them if you've deleted them. Very nice.

The GPS is a nice addition, but we really need live turn by turn. That's coming, but at extra cost. Still, I only need that a few times a year, most of the time, just knowing which direction to go and where I am on that route is enough.

Curiously, yesterday the location button showed my correct location when sitting in the house. Today, it says I am in Stamford, CT. This is without the GPS assistance, since I'm indoors. But even going outside, it didn't bother to check with the GPS. Will have to check that out while driving. Hopefully there's just some glitch with the database of cell towers or something.

OmniFocus is location aware, so I can set a context like grocery store to know where my store is and quickly pull up only tasks that I can take care of right then and there. Nice. Same with home. It doesn't show me my work tasks in that mode when I'm at home.

Sound quality does seem better. I need to get in a place with a lot of background noise to really be able to tell, but I think it will be better.

Hallelujah for the flush 3.5mm headphone jack!

MobileMe has potential, but I'll reserve judgement for when it's really working. Push works great from iPhone. To iPhone—not so much yet.

Jailbreak
The iPhone hackers are just about ready to release their jailbreak tool to allow unauthorized 3rd party apps on the phone. I did this with my previous phone because there are some great utilities and tweaks: having a button on your home screen to quickly turn on/off wifi for instance. I want to be able to do that with 3G too, to save on battery life. Same with screen brightness. I had an app that would toggle between 2 settings for my screen brightness. Plus some free games, and other cool apps, some of which are now for pay apps in the App Store.

Was it worth the wait in line? Absolutely. :-)