iPhone and Me

So… I got an iPhone 3G. In fact, I was the 2nd person at my AT&T store to walk out with one. I was planning on getting one, and had budgeted it way in advance. I was already a relatively happy Blackberry user, and had been on that platform for about 2 years. I loved my Blackberries, but there was quite a bit of functionality that I never used because it was either ugly or unintuitive. Especially the calendar, which was so much of both that it was completely unusable. Syncing with my Mac (using PocketMac for Blackberry) was always a bit of an issue, but it got worse with Leopard. To give you an idea of what I mean, it made me create a calendar called “PocketMac” just so that it could sync any appointments I entered on my handheld back to iCal. Address Book was also a bit off, as double records were not uncommon, especially if I had filled out more information on a record on one side or the other. So with all of my machines but one running 10.5, I knew that an iPhone was going to be my next choice. At least I knew it would sync seamlessly, and the calendar app was basically mobile iCal. So when 3G was announced, I was impressed enough to be willing to upgrade early (I got my BB Curve II in December). So with a fist full of dollars, and my research done (despite thinking July 11 was Wednesday, and was all kinds of mixed up until one of my team mates, who also had the iPhone lust, corrected me) – I settled into the fact that I was going to get an iPhone and pay the $200 early upgrade, no-subsidy-for-you price of $399 for an 8gb iPhone.

I had delusions of just swinging by on Friday at 8am, and picking one up, until my wife laughed and told me I better check it out first. I conceded and ventured out at 11:30pm to scope out the scene. I pulled up at the Waterford AT&T store to find one guy – Mike – sitting in his car. I got out, and asked him Are you the line? He informed there was another line at the AT&T across the street, and that it was well organized, by a guy named Chris, and they were giving everyone a number. I chatted Mike up for a few minutes about the latest iPhone rumors, and got back in my car to cruise over to the other store.

Once I got there, I talked to the guys in charge and pulled #13 in line. The time was at 11:32 pm EST. I got permission to go home and tuck the wife and son into bed, and wrap up a project I was working on. I returned at 3:33am, and found my self the subject to a recount, and slipped to #15 in line. Not Bad, considering I have been gone for 4 hours. In my haste, I forgot to leave my name or get their phone number. I was nicknamed iGuy by line-mates – and they seemed genuinely happy to welcome me back to camp. I unpacked my chair, and water supply and sat down with a chatty group of techies waxing poetic about the internet os and what the iPhone meant to it. They were #18-21 and my kind of geeks. This continued until about 5:42pm. This is when we were starting to organize a split between the two stores. And by choosing to go across the street when it opened, I was moving up in position, even though I still retained the #15, so that we could still easily sort ourselves inside of the larger effort.

They let us go 10 at a time, and we raced over there. Except there was a problem. Sometime between 5-6am, the security over there, who had already sent Mike packing, stopped doing their job and another line had begun to form. The ones with numbers lined up on the other side of the door. The organizers were planning on their connections to AT&T management to settle it in our favor, but when the bickering was starting to really heat up, security called in the calvary. Orange County’s finest arrived in minutes and stormed the castle. AT&T employees began to arrive and the lot of them, cops, security and all – had a quick pow-wow in the store. And when they emerged from the strip mall encasing the Waterford Lakes AT&T store, it didn’t look good. Management had decided that they really couldn’t go by the list, and besides the other line was a lot more vocal, while Chris was asking us to remain quiet so that he could negotiate on our behalf. I don’t blame him for what happened, since security let a line form before 6am, while he had kept us out of the plaza entirely. But it was chaos, like black friday at Wal-Mart, and continued for 20 minutes after the decision had been made, as Chris pleaded for a re-do. I saw which way the wind was blowing and acclimated myself to the other line. Mike followed and we became the new line’s #1 and #2. Other numbered folks from the previous line headed back to get their original spots at the other store, with Chris leading the exodus back, since that’s where his friends were. I guess no good deed goes unpunished, and the whole experience left those guys pretty sore.

The rest of the wait was pretty uneventful and I spent the time cracking iJokes and playing with my baby. I counted down the minutes, and entered the store in the first group of customers. I then spent the next half hour watching “iManni” (that was what was on his name tag) try to figure out the new iPhone 3G check out process. It kept asking him to choose a compatible data plan, and he kept trying to ‘add to existing group’. At one point I even tried telling him to select a different option, like the one that kept listing 9 different data plans next to radio buttons. I was an early upgrade, the hardest of the iPhone eligibility paths, and the on-screen prompts would be confusing to non-techies. (Side note: why do all internal corporate apps look like cat butt? Its like “unusable” was written into the Spec.) He finally tried what I had suggested, after choosing the same option like 10 times. He was stuck in some sort of Point of Sale Möbius loop, that two managers and a senior clerk couldn’t break him out of. A special kind of retail hell, indeed. Finally it was processed and I was the second customer to leave that store that day with the new iPhone. So with my back straight and a spring in my step I proceeded home to shower to I could go show off my prize to the folks at work.

Special Thanks to Etan Horowitz for organizing and evangelizing the #iphonereport hash tag, that let me twitter all night with a purpose. And to Summize for indexing it so I could find them all for this blog post. *Update* Due to this, I got some of my tweets quoted online and in the paper, and was followed up today with a report on Etan’s citizen journalism experiment using twitter.

Here are some crappy pics from my blackberry of the lines: