I have my iPhone!
Friday was Michael's birthday, and he wanted to have dinner in Shadyside. I warned him that there was an Apple Store there and that I would probably not be able to resist visiting it - crowds or no crowds - and he was cool with that.
So we arrived there mid-afternoon to spend some time shopping and exploring the area before dinner. At 3:30 there was a small (maybe 20 or 25 people) line outside the Apple Store. At 5 it was maybe double in size, still not too huge. We headed off to the restaurant for dinner (Casbah - highly recommended, but bring your credit card with the high spending limit) and then after dinner wandered by the Apple Store around 7. The line was short - maybe 8 people - and they let all of us in the store after about one minute. The other people ahead of us in the line were just browsing and I was able to walk straight up to the desk to buy my 8 GB phone. In and out in 5 minutes!
When I got it home I connected it to the laptop (which I had updated with the necessary OS 10.4.10 and iTunes 7.3 earlier) and activated in a matter of minutes. From what I read, others haven't had such a smooth experience.
Since then I've been playing around with it a lot. I should be pretty proficient in typing by the end of the weekend, though I'm not too bad right now. Definitely faster than I ever was on a Palm PDA. Internet speed is slow, but usable for things like email and Google Maps, on EDGE. It's even fairly usable on some web sites, but obviously WiFi is faster.
I look forward to using this in my travels this summer - that will be the real test of it for me.
