<p>I haven’t gotten one yet, but WildChild tells me I (and he) should. He’s a Blackberry fan, but is now sold on the new IPhone, which he says will “revolutionize communications”. He also tells me that I can stalk him with the GPS feature!</p>
<p>Our local ATT store had people in line since yesterday. I wonder if they are sold out.</p>
<p>I just don’t know if I’d want to “put all my eggs in one basket.”</p>
<p>I have a cell phone and an MP3 player. I just bought a Dell Pocket PC; the only thing I’m missing (that I know of) would be the GPS and I’ll bet I could buy one of those pretty cheap too where I could have 4 separate items and be cheaper than the Iphone. Sure, I’ve got more to carry, but I’d feel safer that way in case something happens…</p>
<p><<i haven’t=“” gotten=“” one=“” yet,=“” but=“” wildchild=“” tells=“” me=“” i=“” (and=“” he)=“” should.=“” he’s=“” a=“” blackberry=“” fan,=“” is=“” now=“” sold=“” on=“” the=“” new=“” iphone,=“” which=“” he=“” says=“” will=“” “revolutionize=”" communications".=“” also=“” that=“” can=“” stalk=“” him=“” with=“” gps=“” feature=“”>></i></p><i haven’t=“” gotten=“” one=“” yet,=“” but=“” wildchild=“” tells=“” me=“” i=“” (and=“” he)=“” should.=“” he’s=“” a=“” blackberry=“” fan,=“” is=“” now=“” sold=“” on=“” the=“” new=“” iphone,=“” which=“” he=“” says=“” will=“” “revolutionize=”" communications".=“” also=“” that=“” can=“” stalk=“” him=“” with=“” gps=“” feature=“”>
<p>really??? do all new I phones have that?? That might just be the deterrent I need to make my son not want one!</p>
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<p>I can’t believe I did this (since I’ve never even waited in line for concert tickets, etc.), but I went to our local apple store to wait in line at 6:30 am this morning. I’ve never had any kind of special phone, but after shopping for phones for my S’s 14 birthday, I decided I had to have an internet accessible phone too! It was a long morning, and I finally walked out of the store with my new iphone in hand at 12:30 – 6 hours of waiting. The line itself wasn’t so bad, but once all the country was trying to access the att&t networks for installation, the networks kept on crashing, so we had to spend a few hours just waiting to finalize the purchase. All in all, I’m happy that I did it, and now learning all about the new features. It’s a huge improvement over any type of phone I’ve owned in the past!</p>
<p>Our son’s HS grad present from us was an iPhone. So this morning he arrived at the store at about 6:30 a.m. I arrived two hours later thinking surely he wouldn’t have to wait very long. He left at 10:30 because he had a commitment he needed to keep. At 2 p.m. I walked out with his iPhone. It was not fun, and I wouldn’t do it again. Apple/AT&T should have been better prepared. However, the 20- and 30-somethings around me told me I was a pretty cool mom and advised that he really owes me one now.</p>
<p>I can’t believe so many people would wait in line just to get a new phone even if it is an iphone. I would have left after 15 minutes.</p>
<p>A lot of people at my D’s work had the first gen iphones and they all turned into bricks when they tried to update to 2.0. I don’t know if they’ve managed to fix them yet but it was pretty frustrating for them.</p>
<p>Apple’s pretty lame for not being able to handle the predictable capacity issues with this rollout.</p>
<p>DS stood in line for 6 hours at the Apple store. He had earned the money, and was very excited to get a new iphone. I waited with him for 3 hours, until the AT&T store a block over sold out, and I could get Son authorized to make the transaction on our account. Our Apple store supplied people in line with bottles of water, juice and coffee, and came by with chocolate chip cookies, pizza and red licorice. That was pretty impressive, I thought! Son said he wasn’t sure he would have waited 6 hours if he had known he was going to wait for 6 hours… BUT he’s very happy. I have an original iPhone, and downloaded the new updates. With the exception of the GPS and the larger storage, the phones are pretty similar. I love mine!</p>
<p>I have an original iPhone, waited in line the first weekend they came out, and I don’t regret any of that time. It was kind of exciting – the buzz, the energy, … And Apple has been good to me. My phone started to come apart after dropping it several times, and they replaced it free of charge on the spot.</p>
<p>When do you think the initial flurry will abate? A week, month…? I think I want one, but when can I just walk into the store and get one without a 6 hour wait?</p>
<p>Hard knocks you’re lucky. DD’s iphone has died for some reason. </p>
<p>H did try to get one this morning but on his own schedule. He is not a line waiter. He’ll get it in about 10 days and DD will get his old one. Our guess is the two local AT&T stores didn’t get many phones compared to larger places. </p>
<p>My son updated my original (the one available in Dec.) iphone to 2.0 with no problems, but it took him a few hours. I’ll say there is some very cool stuff on there! I use my phone a lot for work purposes and so far have loved it. The GPS sounds very tempting, but I’ll wait.</p>
<p>My husband rarely falls for “toys”, but had been eager to shed carrying a Palm Pilot for his calendar, MP3 player for his music, and phone (and having to keep all three charged), and was committed to getting the new iPhone today. My son’s birthday is coming up and the 1/3 mega pixel camera in his MDA (that he paid over $200 to get when he could have had a RZR for free when we bought our family plan over two years ago) never worked well (which is a real shame for someone who had hundreds of customers purchase $8K worth of copies of over different 70 images when ages 12-14) and the phone often had other problems from time to time, so we felt it was time for an upgrade for him and decided to give him an iPhone. If we didn’t feel he had decent odds for making good money as an adult, we would have been less likely to spoil him with this phone, and actually, it’s going to cost him $720 to own it over the next 24 months as he is the one who will be paying the $30/month Internet charge (some birthday gift, huh, that commits you to that sort of money being paid out, but we asked him before getting it for him and he did want it). I was hoping to stick with my RZR, but they only give you a really cheap phone with the family plan (T-Mobile gave us three RZRs for free plus car charges and holsters and other freebies with a <em>cheaper</em> family plan that has only run us $80 with taxes and fees per month the past two years, but AT&T gave NO extras and cut no deal for anything other than giving out REALLY cheap free phones if you wanted despite a monthly payment of close to $200/month for the three members of our family to have a family plan plus unlimited Internet for all three phones…if I wanted a new RZR, I’d have to pay $210 for it, MORE than a new iPhone, though I wouldn’t be committed to a $30/month Internet fee). So I ended up going with the $200 iPhone while the guys got the $300 iPhone and if you do the math, these three phones will run our family close to $6K (for the phones themselves, activation fees that run around another $100, taxes, phone covers, and monthly bills for 24 months) for two years of use (a decent cruise could have cost us less, but our son said, “Yeah, but that would only be fun for a week or two rather than two years.”).</p>
<p>The only other time I can recall waiting in line at a nutty hour for anything was for the first midnight release of a Harry Potter book when our son and a friend wanted to be a part of that madness. Once was enough for both me and my son there, though (we ordered via Amazon to have it delivered to our home the day it was first sold the next time). Similarly, I don’t see myself sitting outside a store for hours (interesting experience that it was) chatting with people to get an iPhone again.</p>
<p>As for the store’s line where we went…the people who got in like at around 6 AM did NOT get there in time to make it before they ran out of the larger/$300 iPhone (we were third in line, thus the first to be checked out as there were four check-out people side-by-side and they let people go to the counter in sets of four), and oddly, they didn’t have any black $300 iPhones at the very start of the day even, so all the guys who wanted black (my husband and son included) had to get a white (though for $20, you can get a black cover and that cover doesn’t allow anyone to see the color of the iPhone anyway, making the color matter not in the least). I suspect those who got in line much after 6:30 also couldn’t get the $200 iPhone. I would guess they only had about 20 of each type of iPhone stocked and this was a LARGE AT&T store, so that seemed rather ridiculous to us.</p>
<p>Our first two phones were activated at the store, but the one for our son hit when everyone in the world was trying to activate phones and it couldn’t be done that morning (we waited there from 8 AM to 9:30 and decided to just come back at 5 PM, and had no trouble getting his phone activated then). My husband had gone to an AT&T store two days ago to get pre-qualified to save time and not hold up the line today only to have the system to check prior authorizations be bogged down this morning and thus my husband had to go through the entire name, SSN, pin number from former carrier, etc. business again this morning and so it turned out wasted the time he spent two days ago.</p>
<p>Hard_Knocks, when your phone was dropped several times and started to come apart, did you tell Apple people that it had been dropped? I thought they didn’t replace phones that had been dropped even if you had their protections plan. And did you get a protection plan? We bought one just for our son’s phone (as it’s more important for him to have a working phone as the new dorm won’t even have hard wired phones), but he told us he plans to put on his own apps (not just Apple’s’ apps) and this would invalidate the protection plan and suggested we try to get a refund for that plan (we hadn’t yet opened the box to sign up for the plan really, but did pay for it). Did you also never add any of your own apps to the phone?</p>
<p>I find the phone quite intriguing. Many years ago when the first color Jornada came out, my son paid over $600 to give me one as a Christmas gift (and he didn’t have a big amount of savings back then like today, but was just very generous). I felt it too bulky to carry in my purse and never really used it. 
A few years go, he spent hundreds to give me a magenta iPod (knowing how I love magenta and that it was extremely small to fit easily in a purse) and again, I never really got into carrying it around and <em>using</em> it much at all, and felt bad about his spending all this money for the gift. I am hoping I get my ~$2K worth (again, including the $30/month Internet fee and my part of the family plan fee and taxes and such) out of this device over the next two years. If the camera keeps working well, and I can truly easily email people photos for free (as my RZR charges for sharing photos and the photos are okay, but not all that great), that will help quite a bit toward my feeling it was a decent deal (as my most recent digital camera, small though it is, is considerably larger than the near credit card sized one I had on Semester at Sea in 2004 and so I’ve again never gotten into weighing down my purse with it and so rarely took photos over the past few years). I also very much like the calendar system in the iPhone - very easy to use. And entering multiple phone numbers for the same person is also far more sensibly done with the iPhone than the RZR. </p>
<p>The GPS feature using Google maps is also very neat. It doesn’t (yet - I hear rumor than an app might allow this soon) give directions based on each turn you make as you make it, but it does what Google maps does with the pins for start and destination and showing traffic volume and overlaying a satellite map with your route if you wish and listing just the text of the directions if you like. It has nice options.</p>
<p>The store we went to wasn’t handing anything out (other than water in a plastic cup after we had been there for nearly 90 minutes and our third phone was still not able to be activated by them yet), but that didn’t bother me. It was that they didn’t let people know (when THEY knew) how many phones they had to allow people to go wait in line elsewhere when they knew they had only enough phones for the first X people who wants the $200 model and X who wanted the $300 model (or $300 and $400 models for those with AT&T contracts that hadn’t expired yet). I just felt that was rude/mean to not let those people go elsewhere.</p>
<p>There also was a lot of confusion over our son having a Boston number that we wanted him to be able to transfer to the new phone. Where T-Mobile charged us a $10 one-time fee (and the salesman slipped me a $10 bill in cash back to offset that fee) for having one phone with a number outside of our state on our family plan, AT&T hemmed and hawed and finally told us they couldn’t even have an out of area phone on our family plan - that if our son wanted to keep his same number and we to keep our in state numbers, he’d have to have his own account now rather than stay on our family plan. I tend to think the people at this store just didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t want to bother trying to transfer the Boston line over (which they first claimed was a number out of AT&T service area, which we know it should not be as it’s a dark orange color on the AT&T map). In the end, I think our son’s new number is a far better number (easier to remember) that the one he’s had for over two years now, but he will have to let all his friends know the new number and that could be a bit of a hassle.</p>
<p>As with most things, my vote on how good or bad a choice all these iPhones bought today were will be out for another year or two. Meanwhile, I just hope they at least continue to work decently. Unfortunately, we have a pretty crummy signal (if any, as at some times today, we had no signal at all in the basement and it could have just been due to the airwaves being overcrowded today or a thing we’ll typical experience - not sure yet) in our basement, just like with T-Mobile (Verizon had a decent signal in our basement and so I miss Verizon for that). Other than that, the phones seem pretty nifty.</p>
<p>I work in NYC. I asked someone to stand in line for me at 7am. I arrived there at 7:30am. There were 40 people in front of me. I was in the store 8:55 and out by 9:10am. There were 2 fights that almost erupted around me - people’s friends cutting in line. Those stores were ill equiped to set up those iPhones. Their software crashed a few times. By the time they got to me it was a lot faster. I had a family plan, but they had to open an individual acct for me to have it go throught, then I had to customer service to combine it with my family plan again.</p>
<p>I am still trying to get used it because of the touch pad, especially typing, I keep on having fat fingers. We are going to try to get 2 more tomorrow.</p>
<p>Saw the line at our local store–appeared to be 100 or so people. It started raining with thunder and lightening. It did not look like anyone left the line even in a nasty rainstorm. Sorry–no phone is worth waiting in line in a thunderstorm!! (But, I hope that after all the waiting these people at least were able to purchase one!!!)</p>
<p>I don’t understand all the hype - when you factor in the cost of the minimum plan, it is MORE expensive over two years than the old iPhone, and you aren’t getting all that much more.</p>
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<p>The phone looked bad – I don’t think I could have played off the damage any other way! </p>
<p>I went to the Apple store, told them I knew it was my fault and just wanted to know what my options would be to repair it if it stopped working. The technician started to give me the standard line about the flat repair fee, but the manager walked by and said to give me a break (I had been waiting for a long time while holding a sleeping toddler). </p>
<p>What’s that old expression about getting more with sugar than vinegar? I have no doubt that if I had gone in guns blazing, that they wouldn’t have helped.</p>
<p>unregistered- You really are getting a lot more with this second gen IPhone. The 3G network, push email, etc. It is an expensive plan, but I have a Blackberry anyway, so it isn’t all that much more per month.</p>
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<p>How is it more than the old iPhone? Wasn’t the one last year $600 and a minimum monthly cost the same for voice coverage (or did that go up $10 in the past year?) and just $10 less per month for Internet coverage (which they claim they increased to keep in line with the Blackberry service charge and due to the faster speed of Internet with this one)? $10 x 24 = $240 and the difference in phone is either $400 or $300 depending on which phone you buy (or slightly more with tax, but still not quite enough to make it more expensive with the service plan than the iPhone from last year that I can tell). But having GPS in the car (even if it doesn’t give step by step instructions aloud like the ones made for cars, it at least triangulates your position and gives you directions from where you are at any given time without you entering in an address for the starting place) is a perk nearly worth the $10 increase to me (indeed, for GPS on some phones that had in last year, I believe AT&T charged $10/month).</p>
<p>Nice to hear your being nice was rewarded, Hard_Knocks. I’ve always said the same thing about sugar versus vinegar.</p>
<p>Mom of WildChild, are you paying the extra $70-100/year (heard different accounts in line of the price) for the push email? My husband seems to want that, but I don’t (in part because I receive way too much email to make it practical unless you can push only CERTAIN email…can you do that?).</p>
<p>I wouldn’t get a device without push email- I’m too used to it on the Blackberry. I have 2 Blackberrys (yes, I spell it that way on purpose when referring to the phone as opposed tot he fruit)- work and personal. I would pay the extra for the iphone for ALL the new features, but the push email is critical in my view. If you link an email account to the device, it is going to push all the email unless you set some junk filters to have it sorted at the server. I do that with some of my work emails.</p>
<p>My daughter and I just went to an Apple Store at our local mall (Short Hills Mall) to get 2 more phones. We got there around 9am and we were out there by 10. The service there was a lot better than ATT. They set up emails for us, FYI Verizon and Comcast have a weird set up with the email accts, and put a transparent plastic over the screen for us. We need to get one more for the younger one, but can’t get it now because she is away at a camp.</p>