Arrived at the North Canton, Ohio AT&T store at high noon and was #6 in line... by 6 pm we were probably 30-40 in number, including one other confirmed MacRumors reader!
I was in the first group to enter, and I gotta say, you feel like a king walking in that store under such conditions! Grabbed an 8 GB for me and a 4 GB for my wife (plus cases for each and a car charger... no Bluetooth headset at this store yet) and we made tracks for home!
I definitely feel bad reading that so many folks are having activation problems here, but mine was an absolute breeze on both iPhones. Already at AT&T customer. I had one strange hitch, I activated my 8 GB first and the phone lit up saying it was activated but iTunes kept showing that it was being activated... after 5 mins. I just pulled the phone out of the dock and iTunes went back to normal and the phone worked. Immediately made a call to the wife (who was out picking up some dinner) and the reception was awesome compared to my former Motorola SLVR (which I can't wait to smash with a hammer, LOL). We live in a brick triplex and the SLVR would often not get reception, and when it did it sounded like I was speaking in a hornet's nest from all the electrical interference. The iPhone was clear as a bell and I even walked around the entire apartment (including the kitchen, which is a notorious cell "dead zone") and the call never cut out or dropped once. Yay!
After setting up to sync a bunch of stuff while eating dinner, I began to play! I have to say, at first there was a weird disappointment/frustration in my head... maybe it was heat stroke from waiting 6 hours in line or the inevitable "coming down" after a long, 6-month wait for this sucker, I dunno. All of the websites seemed so small in Safari and zooming & panning felt awkward... but this feeling passed quickly once I got the hang of the double-tap and then delight set in as I realized that pretty much all of my "gotta have" websites were working great (including my bank, Chase.com and Netflix of course!). The American Express site had an odd glitch... my business card displays data just fine, but my personal One card seems to use Flash and therefore it doesn't. How odd.
EDGE felt like molasses to me at first, but the more I used it, oddly it seemed to speed up! I think it will be serviceable and certainly it's much faster than the cruddy GPRS I was getting on my SLVR (not to mention the much-better Internet experience).
Someone mentioned their contact pix didn't sync from Address Book, but mine were all OK. There seems to be a glitch with iTunes, the "Put new events created on this iPhone into the calendar:" option kept getting stuck on both mine and my wife's; no matter what you select, it stays on the last one. As soon as I did a manual selection and deselected the last one (which I didn't need anyway because it was synced to Delicious Library), all worked great. My wife had 3 e-mail accounts to be synced but I only chose 2 of them and for some reason, they all 3 synced.
I had a feature film that had been ripped in the latest Handbrake with 5.1 surround audio; the picture played just fine on the iPhone but there's no audio (guess that's to be expected).
Very happy to see simple little features like world time, stopwatch and timer under the Clock mode. Now if they could just do something about custom ringtones...
But all in all, this puppy was well worth the 6 months of waiting and I think it will change my life for the better in the days, weeks & months to come. Like most of you, I'm an Internet junkie and this is the first phone that I think will actually be useful for getting out of the house and doing something but still staying connected.
JRB
!!