Pants Full of Unix

Right, so. On Friday of last week, I rolled over to the New at&t store at 16th and Ranstead, as may have been inferred from that last post. I had planned to cut out just barely early and go over with a camera. I forgot the camera, but the good Mayor's presence pulled all the local affiliates in and made any of my photography pretty irrelevant, so that didn't matter much. But I found I still wanted to Be There, so I went.

Once there, arriving about 5 minutes before the doors opened and finding the line shorter than half a block, I figured, “Hey, what the hell. If I'm going to stick around for the scene, I might as well snag a place in line and think about it.” As it happened, vocalizing how I felt about the device, and how the various shortcomings it undeniably has simply wouldn't affect my usage, enumerated below, I decided that I actually did want this thing.

The shortcomings

Small storage / no removable storage (CF etc)

I'm still not convinced I even need 4 GB here, much less the 8 GB I went ahead and got. I don't plan to keep music on this thing: I've got an iPod for that (and, really, would prefer to still be using a Rio Karma, but we know how that went). My current plan is to just put (mostly NPR) podcasts on the iPhone, and those are < 200 MB on the iPod.

No 3G

I suppose that'd be nice, but AT&T Cingular the New at&t's EDGE network is much better built out than the 3G and it's really been enough for me, using the old SE phone via DUN and Bluetooth (which, apparently, is un-possible with the iPhone… bleh), since most of what I do is text-based. Which leads nicely into…

“Third party applications” aka, “give me SSH”

Voila. I mean, it's beta and all, and I'll probably hack on it a bit, but that's a leg up on doing it from scratch.

So I hung around until they ran out on Friday (when I was about twenty people from the door), shrugged and walked away. When 18:00 PDT rolled around, I hopped on the Apple Store online and placed an order, finding the “2 to 4 weeks” shipping time that's upset several people, and figuring “either I'll wait, or I'll cancel if I get one sooner… and even if that doesn't work, I'm sure it'll go for purchase price on eBay, so whatever”.

Last night, I happened to look at the check availability page, and discovered that one of the two Philly-area Apple Stores claimed to have stock today. On the way to work this morning, I stopped back by the same at&t store, where they still hadn't received any more than their original shipment. But… well, what the hell. I called the King of Prussia mall Apple Store where, lo and behold, they assured me that they still had stock. So I reserved the Philly Car Share Prius in the parking lot next to my building and cruised on out. There are ample iPhones there, still, now. There was a wall of them at the back, lots of highschool kids oggling but not buying.

And then home to begin the reportedly excrutiating activation process. Sure enough, I received the famed “extra time” warning, and sure enough the phone this iPhone is replacing was already carrying an “inactive SIM” at that point. The iPhone's SIM worked fine, of course, but it needed to remain in the iPhone for activation to complete, and the iPhone hooked into iTunes. Or so the drones said, when they also confirmed that the process of my activation looked normal and nothing weird about my account (those reporting problems have invariably had something wonky: unpaid bills, unconverted “old” AT&T Wireless customers, business accounts, accounts with very few minutes, family plans with an iPhone replacing only one of the handsets). Okay, whatever, stall for a bit, still no activation email. Make some more coffee, head back to the office.

Sure enough, the “activation complete” email arrived 5 minutes after I walked back out the door. Now I'm waiting on the initial sync… seems that syncing calenders is broken in some way. Possibly the data I've got? Anyway, off to play…