My plan to purchase an iPhone from the AT&T on Port Washington Rd was a good one.  I arrived shortly before 4:30pm.  I ended up being 13th in line.  I hear the Apple store at Bayshore had a line around the block.  So by 6:15 or so, I was in possession of (1) 8GB iPhone.  SUCCESS!

My first impression was that the device was very slick and intuitive. The touch screen is a great idea and makes navigating each part of the phone very easy.  However as someone who is used to the "old" kind of cellphone, it takes a minute to get adjusted to this new way of using a device like this.  Once you get the feel for how buttons are layed out, they are pretty easy to find and things just "click". I still am having a hard time getting used to the virtual keyboard, apparently my thumbs are just too large.

I like how text message conversations are displayed, closely ressembling an instant message interface.  

E-mail is easy to set up using the preset for GMail.  The display of e-mail is great cause of real fonts and the ability to zoom and see pictures in-line. Clicking links opens up Safari (more on that later) and it is easy to create contacts from e-mails, which is helpful.

Syncing with iTunes works pretty well for contacts but I ran into my first complaint.  I've been using iTunes for awhile with my old iPod.  I always go back and forth between work and home and as such I turn off automatically synchronizing my library.  This isn't a problem because I could just drag music onto the iPod.  Not so with the iPhone.  In order to get music onto it, you have to sync playlists.  So unless I'm missing something, this extra step is somewhat annoying.  The videos said "best iPod ever".  I say "oh really".

I intended to post this a bit more quickly, but the friend whose house I was at when I set the phone up couldnt tell me what his WEP key was.  He logged into his wireless access point and showed me this horribly long hexidecimel nightmare of a key I would have had to type in.  With my tubby thumbs and general iPhone newbie status, I balked at that task.  No WiFi for me, yet.  

Using the AT&T edge network to browse the web is slow.  Period.  WiFi is more usable, but very large sites with a lot of ads and graphics seem to make Safari unhappy.  One such site is this one.  Maybe an iPhone friendly stylesheet is in order, huh OMC? 

Sync'ing my contacts from my Blackberry Pearl to Outlook was always pretty easy.  Luckily so was sync'ing them from Outlook into iPhone (via iTunes).  I added a bunch of contacts by hand before I thought of this double ended sync, so I had quite a bit of practice.  Adding contacts is fast and easy.

The 2.0 megapixel camera on the iPhone takes some pretty nice photos.  I haven't yet e-mailed them to see what they look like on a normal computer but this actually looks like it could be a feasible camera phone.  The 1.3M pixel blackberry pearl camera was pretty good, but the quality of the images was always a bit low.  I intend to compare them side by side later.

The google maps interface was very cool, it automatically loads traffic data onto the map.  I saw that I94 near summerfest was flashing yellow last night before I headed down there.  Very cool.

The playing part of the iPod functionality is great.  With a speaker on the phone you can jam outloud or use the headphones.   Browsing with cover art is a really cool concept and I love it!

Ok, I'm about blogged out for now, I'll post some more impressions after I've played with it a bit more