My brave quest to procure ... an iPhone

Readers will recall my regret last week over not lining up with all the other idiots outside my local Apple store on July 11 to buy an iPhone 3G the day it came out.

I'm happy to report that my quest is complete. I have acquired an iPhone.

It was an arduous, yet heroic journey. It began late on July 18, when I saw on Apple's Web site that the store at the Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax County, Va. would have iPhones in stock the next morning.

I woke up at 7:15 on July 19, thinking the store opened at 10. I got there at 8:30. A line of roughly 250 people stretched out the door. The store had been open since 8. They sold out by 9, but thought they might get another shipment. An employee finally told the crowd at about 9:30 that "if you're in line here" -- gesturing to about where I stood -- "you're probably not getting a phone today."

I left, despondent. For the next two days, Apple's Web site showed that every store in Virginia and Maryland was sold out. But I read some message boards. People were saying that the Web site wasn't correct -- that stores sometimes got shipments early in the day, after the Web site was updated. You had to call.

On Tuesday, I called the Clarenden store. They had iPhones. The line was about 20 people long. I dropped what I was doing and ran to the Metro. I missed the train to Clarenden. Heartbreak. Plan B: I took the train to Rosslyn, then got off and flagged a cab to Clarenden. I ran to the store. The line was only maybe a dozen people long. The store employees told us that they only had one model in stock: black, 16 gigabytes. Exactly what I wanted. I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

An hour-and-a-half later, I bought an iPhone.

A friend of mine who's too smart for these stupid lines and instead ordered an iPhone from an AT&T store (delivery takes about two weeks) asked me for a review today. Here's roughly what I sent him; warning, it may bore you if you're not a gadget freak:

So it goes without saying that the iPhone is the greatest advance in personal communications technology ever, and it makes my six-month-old BlackBerry (top 'o the line at the time) feel like a goddamn pager.

It's an amazing feeling to have your music, your phone and your e-mail all on one device -- and to have an Internet browser and GPS thrown in there too, and to have it all run on a fairly quick network.

The good:

• Phone clarity is fine, much better than my Razr, and reception in DC seems to be pretty good. Deep inside buildings and elevators, the signal goes out, but everywhere else I have at least a few bars, including, crucially, my basement apartment.
• Music sounds fine, as good as any iPod, even on the tinny earbuds that are provided with the phone.
• The maps function works pretty well. For a while the phone was convinced that I was in Six Flags over Georgia, near Atlanta. Don't ask me why. I instructed it to look for me in DC a few times and that problem seems to have cleared up.
• The apps I've played with so far are okay. There are some crucial apps still missing, like a good chat client (AIM for iPhone sucks, apparently) and a voice recorder that allows you to download recordings. I haven't been blown away by any that I've downloaded, so far. I do have this funny one that makes use of the accelerometer to slide a pint of beer down a bar (called iPint), but I wouldn't say that it's real useful.
• AT&T's 3G network isn't broadband, by any means, but it's reasonably fast. NYT Website loads in maybe 15, 20 seconds; Google in maybe 5 seconds, tops.
• Safari browser is okay. Size is a severe limitation; even zoomed in on Web pages, it's difficult to read on an iPhone -- you have to constantly move the page around with your finger, AND you have to be careful not to click on any links or ads while doing so.

The great:

• Size and weight is perfect. Fits in a pants pocket fine, and feels great in the hand.
• The touchscreen is simply a piece of art. I could swipe through my contacts or my music all day long.
• The e-mail client is tremendous. Takes gmail or Yahoo!, both fine e-mail clients by themselves, and scales them down without losing any functionality that I notice, except for gchat. I prefer using Yahoo! mail on the phone, in fact -- it's faster than Yahoo!'s interface (one reason I'm trying to migrate most casual e-mail to gmail).
• Texting is easier on this thing than on any other phone I've owned. And the text interface is pretty cool.
• The phone can sync with my Outlook calendar and contacts at work, and with my music at home. Calendar and contacts work great.

The surprising:

• The keyboard is smarter than I thought. I had a lot of problems typing on it when I first got it, but either I'm improving really fast or the thing is actually somehow learning to adjust to my finger pokes and produce more accurate results. It's also got a built-in, on-the-fly spellchecker that works well, once you put your trust into it. I don't think I'll ever type as fast on iPhone as I can on a BlackBerry, but it's possibly not going to be as painful as I thought.
• Battery life hasn't been a problem. I intentionally ran the battery down to zero yesterday, and to do it I had to leave music running most of the day, even when I wasn't listening to it, and needlessly surf the Web and send e-mails even when I was sitting in front of my computer. 3G was on all day long, as was wireless network detection. It finally konked out at about 6:30 p.m., and it hadn't even been charged the previous night except while I was transferring music.

The bad:

• No Flash or Java. That means no StatTracker. [A little Java applet by Yahoo! that tracks NFL stats in real-time on Sundays -- ed.] Sucks.
• No copy-and-paste is a pain for things like filling out contact info.

The really bad:

• [Here, I went on a long and profane diatribe about a little problem I'm having with my employer's IT department, the upshot being that they inexplicably won't let me connect my iPhone to the company's Exchange server and thus I have to continue to use my BlackBerry to fetch my corporate e-mail when I'm out of the office. It's a real pain.]
  

So for the time being, I'm still stuck carrying two devices around. Major bummer.