I am in line in Rogers Arkansas at one of the AT&T stores waiting for the new iPhones. I didn’t spend the night because I am not so crazy about getting one which has put me a long way back in line.

Now that Apple and AT&T have dropped the price and the uber-geeks have had one for a year now, the nature of the line has changed. This new phone with its lower costs marks a change in the nature of the common iPhone owner.

My prediction is that this version of the iPhone will be the next Razr. You know, the phone that you see everywhere. That does take away some of the cachet of owning one, but who cares, I am still excited about getting one, though I may not be able to get one today.

Stay tuned, and you can see a picture of the line on flickr. My flickr username is murdog. Sorry I don’t have the address to the pic itself, but I am uploading this post using my Blackjack…ironic

UPDATE:———
Well, if you were following me on Twitter then you no doubt know that I didn’t end up getting an iPhone. Some people on the Internet are speculating that AT&T is rationing its supply of iPhones so that they will have stock throughout the weekend. From what I heard from the people at the AT&T store I was at, I can’t find any proof that they are wrong.

There was something fishy in how cagey the managers were at AT&T. They were pretty “sure” that there would be more iPhones available in the morning. If this is true and they are rationing the phones and thus screwing the people who took the time to line up on the first day that the phone came out just so they could have some to sell on Saturday…that is not ok.

Obviously there is no proof unless someone from AT&T spills the beans on this, but there were striking similarities in experiences across the nation today as I scanned the blogs.

Apple stores had around a thousand iPhones on hand while AT&T stores had from 50 to 75. That is a big difference in numbers. The closest Apple store is two hours away. It would be ridiculous to drive that far for a phone that will miraculously appear on the shelves of our local AT&T store tomorrow morning.

I don’t know. I don’t know why this has made me so mad, but it has. Come on AT&T this looks terrible for your customer service. Quit assuming that customers will put up with your shenanigans forever. We won’t. Stop being ridiculous…

One of the biggest complaints that people had about the iPhone has just been sorted. I am keeping track of Engadget’s coverage of today’s Apple iPhone event. According to Phil Schiller, Apple’s WW Product Marketing muckety-muck, says that Apple has integrated Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology into the iPhone making it complete compatible with corporate email infrastructures.

Now if you are a corporate drone, it is now possible for you to get your corporate email. That is a big deal because there is a huge number of potential iPhone customers out there who have averted purchasing an iPhone because it won’t work with their company’s email system. RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, has made its entire business model out of being business friendly. Now that the iPhone is corporate friendly, the mobile phone market is really going to change.

The iPhone has already gone a long way in changing the mobile phone ecosystem. It has shown people what is possible when you really put a lot of care in the design of your handset. Everyone I know who has ever purchased an iPhone loves it. The main sticking point is that it hasn’t worked with corporate email until now. Now that iPhone works for business world’s are colliding.

The event is still going so I don’t know if Apple has made any statements about 3G roll out, but if they do then the last of the major sticking points is gone. That will leave only the lack of a hardware keyboard as a problem. The keyboard issue will never go away, so you will either have to write that one off or buy a different product.

If you have any interest in the iPhone, Apple, or Steve Jobs, then this is a must read.  It is an article by PC Magazines Sascha Segan.  It will shed some light into a possible falling out between Sir Steve and the AT-AT.  Very interesting…very interesting indeed!

Now that I have all the 3G goodness, I am going to use it with my lappy (laptop computer). I figured out how to do it and I blogged about it in a previous post.

Now that AT&T rolled out 3G in Northwest Arkansas, I tried to link up with those instructions and was unable to get it to work. I just did some investigation on the AT&T site and found these instructions.

I don’t have my USB cable here at the house so I can’t give it a try, but rest assured that in the coming days I will blog about my experience. It will be awesome to spread this high speed bandwidth goodness wherever I go with my aging HP lappy.

Engadget is reporting with “100% certainty” that a group of 6 guys who call themselves the iPhoneSIMfree.com team has made it possible to unlock the iPhone from AT&T and use it with any GSM carrier.

For those of us in the US, this isn’t that big of a deal. The only other GSM carrier of note is T-mobile, and they have their issues just like AT&T… mobile users just have to pick which issues they can deal with and go with that carrier.

The people who profit the most from this news are people outside of the United States. Many countries will never see the iPhone, and the ones that will, won’t be seeing it anytime soon…until now.

The iPhoneSIMfree.com team seems to have found an unreversible way to unlock the iPhone which is great news to us, the consumer. Products should be free. We should be able to purchase electronics and use them wherever and however we want to. These lock-in contracts break the fabric of our free-market system, and leads to artificially inflated prices and functionality-poor devices.

If real market forces are thwarted through monopolistic practices then the gray market will force the hand of the players involved.

I am an AT&T customer, and I don’t plan on buying an iPhone, but I still see this as very interesting news, and I am anxious to see how this all plays out.

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Now playing: Nouvelle Vague - Friday Night Saturday Morning

This is yet another test of writing a blog entry in an easier way on my cell phone. If I can get this to work then my phone with its new fancy schmancy high speed connection will be just that much more handy.

The high speed connection has already sped up my blog reading on the phone, a task that was laborious at best with the slower connection. Now, I can blast through my RSS feeds and comment on them anywhere if I can only get this posting thing sorted.

The problem is the Wordpress interface is extremely clunky when I try to post from the phone. If I can make this new trick work, then I will be completely free from having to be at a computer to post.

I hope it works… So far I havn’t been successful. Here’s to hoping…

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It didn’t work, but since I went to the trouble of writing the post, I thought I would post it anyway. Still working out the kinks…

I surfed on over to DSL Reports on my cell phone and did a speed test on my new 3G connection. I was very interested to see what types of speed were possible. I did the test a number of times, and it averaged out at around 750 Kbits per second. It took around 7 to 10 seconds to download a 1 MB file.

That is pretty exciting. It isn’t nearly as fast as my cable internet, but for the things that you do on your phone, that is plenty of speed.

I was excited to find some videos to watch, but because cingular changed to the “new AT&T” (not a fan of that…) the urls that lead to videos that are baked into the phone no longer work. My phone looks for the cingular mobile site that no longer exists…has anyone there ever heard of a redirect. That is a major oversight. Boo on you AT&T.

Add to that, there are a ton of markets who’ve had 3G for a long time. I am glad that we finally have it, but it is about dang time!!

All in all, I am pretty pleased with the service, but we shall see in the coming months how I like it over time.

Finally, AT&T rolled out 3G here in Northwest Arkansas. My phone is now a rocket sled. It took them a long time to get it out up here. Surrounding cities have had it for quite a long time now. That made it really nice to go to those towns.

Surfing on the old Edge network was almost impossible to bear. I’m looking forward to finding new uses for my phone now that I can zip around the network.

I have to get this phone working as a modem on my laptop., then we would really be talking.

I am also giving the T9 typing assist a try on the old Blackjack. I don’t know if I like it or not. Having the full keyboard means that a lot of the time it is easier to just type the word. I don’t know if i will keep it on or not.

Sprint, a company hemorrhaging money, has sent out a letter to it’s customers who have called customer service too often to let them know that their service will be terminated at the end of July…WHAT?!? Are you serious?

The company I work for has Sprint phones, and we have had HORRIBLE service with them. When we have problems, and yes we seem to have an inordinate amount of problems with Sprint, it is incredibly hard to find someone who seems to know anything.

On many occasions, we have received assurances that a problem had been resolved only to hear from someone else in the company that those assurances were baseless do to company policies.

Now, Sprint is firing its own customers… what a joke! Could this be the beginning of the death watch for Sprint. I suggest using your number portability and head over to Verizon if you likes the CDMA, or go to AT&T…anything would be better giving your money to Sprint.

This is a PR nightmare. Sprint = Idiot…

I am at an AT&T store entering this blog entry on an iPhone. The typing is a little slow, but if you hold the phone sideways, the keyboard is a little bigger. That makes it a lot easier to type.

It is a fun toy, but I don’t expect I will be getting one anytime soon.