As you all know — this morning at 8 AM PST, the new iPhone 3G was made available at Apple and AT&T stores on the west coast. Being a compulsive early adopter of such things, I somehow managed to tear myself out of bed around 6 AM this morning and head down to the Apple Store in Emeryville Califorinia. I arrived somewhere between 6:30 and 6:45 AM, and even though deep down I knew that it was going to be ridiculous — the whole experience still managed to be much crazier than I expected.

Approaching the Apple Store, every step revealed more and more people waiting in the line that stretched most of the sidewalk in front of the Emeryville Mall. In my relatively delirious state, I excepted the situation and joined Mikeal in the line. About 15 minutes into our wait the Apple Store staff, and Mall security people started alerting people at the end of the line (where we were) that the direction the line was building to the left of the Apple store was going to be in the way of the construction and that they would like everyone to move to the right side of the store, but to stay in the same order. Clearly this is an absolutely ludicrous request considering that no one wants to be there waiting in the line, and everyone will do whatever they can to jump a few spaces. I instantly started walking to the other side of the store where no one was yet, and we found a nice set of steps to sit on about 50 feet from the front doors of the store. Instead of people being annoyed by us, then went ahead and built a new line with us in it putting us significantly closer to the magical new phone than we had been before.

I do have to admit that the fact that the Apple employees were constantly walking up and down the line passing out water, answering questions and passing out necessary information did in fact distract us enough to keep me from losing my mind. The Pandora guys stopped by to chat, and gave out some pretty sweet hats. I have since tried the Pandora App on the new phone and it is really slick, certainly recommended.

Somewhere around 9:15 we made out way into the store, to be greeted by another line that lasted around 15 minutes before we could actually talk to a sales specialist to do the deed. This is where things started to fall apart for me. My sales specialist (who was a pretty cool guy) disappeared into the back and came back with the box for my new 16g white iPhone 3G and started filling out the hand held device to complete the sale. After inputting all of my information, a big yellow box pops up on his screen saying that I am not eligible for the AT&T price and that my only option is to pay the full $699 to buy the phone without a plan. Considering that I have been with AT&T since the acquisition of Cingular, and my having an iPhone with them for a year I couldn’t understand that the problem could be. Instantly I got AT&T on the line (which was amazingly fast to get a rep on a day like today) who proceeded to tell me that I had an overdue balance (due yesterday) and that I haven’t been with AT&T long enough to be eligible for the upgrade and thus will be required to pay full price.

In my delirious state, I considered just paying full boat so I could get the hell out of there — or cancel my plan and just be done with it all. Instead I asked about three times to talk to a supervisor (to which I was told three times that they couldn’t “Override any of the rules”). I do have to interject that she was polite and could have been much more unpleasant (T-Mobile, Verizon, lets not go there), and a few minutes later I was on the phone with her supervisor. You must keep in mind that my poor sales specialist is standing there, with my phone half rung up (probably there since 6 AM as well) looking at a long day of selling phones, dealing with unruly Apple Fans and possibly having to listen to many unpleasant phone calls to the carrier. The supervisor after a few minutes of back and forth about the situation, and the realization that I was standing here in this situation announced that “If I pay my overdue balance, I can get the discounted rate.”, Hallaluia!

I’m now all paid up and feeling like a dodged a serious bullet, and it’s time to head to the front of the store to open things up and activate the phone. A woman with a huge camera, filming this whole event asked me a few questions and recorded me opening the phone… which was sort of strange. I wonder if I’m going to be on TV somewhere! We plugged the phone in and whala — a big error pops up from iTunes. We unplugged the phone and tried about 3 more times (as did everyone at the table trying to activate), and then I was released to go finish activation at home.

I’m not an infrastructure guy by any means, but didn’t anyone learn ANYTHING from the last time around? Call me crazy, but I would have assumed that this time around the servers for activation would have been beefed up enough to handle the load. The best part is that as soon as I left the store and went to use my iPhone 2G to call people to let them know I had survived and was heading out I received a “No Service” notice, and was now unable to use either phone.

I basically sat from 10:30AM to 1:30PM trying about every 5 minutes to activate the new iPhone and received the ugly error each time. FINALLY, it went through — and I am back to a working state of communication.

To answer your questions, yes 3G is that much faster. The screen is a slightly different size, the device is lighter, and thiner and the buttons have been enhanced for more satisfying feedback. The camera looks exactly the same, but the Applications store makes it all worth while. I have been told that the phone has a GPS chipset, but for some reason one Application thinks I’m in Seattle and Google Maps thinks I’m in San Ramon — so there appears to be a problem there. One last quibble — every time the phone wants to use your location data, a dialog pops up asking you if it’s okay. I understand the reasoning behind this, but please please please let us turn that off, it’s getting super annoying.

The applications I have installed and are really enjoying include:
- Where, Yelp, Google, Facebook, Jott, Remote, CheckPlease, Pandora, Shazam, Evernote, Movies.app, NYTimes, Whrrl, Loopt, and of course — Twitteriffic.

There are many more apps and games that I am going to explore as soon as I get a moment.

Was it worth it? Of course it was — all this insanity is half the fun.