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…

The good news for me is that now it is a ton easier to post to my blog using my Samsung Blackjack. Wordpress 2.5 has redesigned the blog entry screen so that it is much easier to get to typing posts. Before Wordpress 2.5, I had to scroll past an extremely long list of Categories to get to the part of the page where you type your entry. Normally, when I log into my site I am on a full-sized computer that displays webpages correctly. On a big computer, my extraordinarily long list of Categories are hidden in a pull down menu. My phone’s browser isn’t powerful enough to display my dashboard correctly and just stacks each Category one on top of the other.

“What’s a Category?” Great question. If you look just under the title of each blog entry you will see some blue words that categorize that story. Wordpress doesn’t limit how many categories I use and obediently remembers every one I have ever used. The list is crazy long.

Now, I don’t have to deal with that list when posting from my phone. Upgrade!

Now if I could just figure out how to type faster on this tiny keyboard…

– Update–

I am on my laptop now so I am kind of cheating, but I had to give a quick update about completing my entry.  After I typed up my blog entry, I clicked done which launched me back to my dashboard window.  I still had to scroll past the some 150+ categories except now it is not as bad because I am now seeing all these categories after I typed the entry.  With the blog article still fresh on my mind, I can categorize it more effectively.  So, I still have to scroll a lot, only now it is more profitable.

Wow, finally I can post to my blog from my phone easily. I just uploaded a new plugin called wphone, and it seems to be working really well. I have tried to blog from my phone somewhat successfully but because I have used all sorts of different categories or tags or whatever you want to call them I had to scroll like 15 minutes to get to the window to enter the post. Needless to say, I didn’t want to put myself very often so I didn’t post much from my phone. Now if I could just speed up my thumb typing, all would be good in the world.

What what?? I am posting this using my cell phone as a modem. I finally got it to work! I tried for over an hour unsuccessfully to get my computer to see the Internet through my phone. It wasn’t until I went into the settings of the phone and change the USB’s default settings to ‘Modem’ instead of ‘ActiveSync’. Here is how I did it.

Before You Do Anything…
In order to use you AT&T 3G phone as a modem, you have to download AT&Ts Communication Manager. Normally, I try not to use third-party connection management programs because they are usually poorly written. In this case, you need it because it installs the correct drivers and creates the needed dial-up setting.

I have done some testing, once I installed the AT&T Communication Manager, I connected to the Internet without it, and my Samsung Blackjack kept dropping the connection. Once I turned the Communication Manager back on and used it to connect to the net, all was fine.

After you have the AT&T CM installed, you need to make these changes to your phone:

1. Click the ‘Start’ Button on the phone.
2. Click on ‘Settings”
3. Click on ‘Connections’
4. Click on ‘USB’
5. Set the ‘USB Connection setting:’ to ‘Modem’*
6. Open the AT&T Communication Manager Program on your computer
7. BEFORE you connect you phone, click on ‘Device Wizard’ in the ‘Tools’ Menu
8. Follow the instructions in the wizard.
9. Once connected to you phone, click the ‘Connect’ button in the AT&T Communication Manager and then…Boom, you should be up and running!!!!

* If you use ActiveSync, your phone will warn you that ActiveSync will no longer work. Just remember to change your USB back to ‘ActiveSync’ before you try to sync again.

I also went into the task manager and turned off the ActiveSync program just for good measure.

After I did these things, the AT&T Connection Manager saw the phone as a Modem and voila… here I am blogging using the phone as my connection to the tubes!!!

What a deal…

————————
I just tested the speed, and they are comparable to what I was seeing the other night when I tested the speed using the browser on the phone itself. I am getting around 750kbps down and 120 kbps up. Plenty fast for blogging and email and light browsing. I am ecstatic!

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.

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…

———–

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.

This post is no longer current. Check out this newer post on using a Samsung Blackjack as a modem.
———————————————————

In the ongoing saga story of my new phone, I just used it to connect to the Internet. It works! What a deal. My BlackJack came with a USB cable, and I used it to connect it to my laptop. The laptop saw the phone, and loaded all the necessary drivers from the CD that also came with the phone.

I tried to set up a modem connection on my own, but failed. Next, I went to the Internet and did a search to find out how to do it. I went to a number of sites, each of which explained a different way to connect to the Internet using the BlackJack, and none of them worked. Finally, I found a link to the Cingular site which had a great tutorial as to how make the connection work. If you go to the above link, click on Connect device and laptop/PDA to access internet. The site asks you to detail your setup, and once you have, it takes you to a page that fully details how to make the connection work.

I am posting an excerpt from it for my own purposes of the part in the instructions where the rubber hits the road.

1. Click on Start, Settings, Control Panel and double click on Phone and Modem Options.
2. Click on the Modems tab.
3. Click to select the SAMSUNG CDMA Modem and click on Properties.
4. Click on the Advanced tab.
5. In the Extra initialization commands field, type at+cgdcont=1,”IP”,”isp.cingular”
6. Click on OK twice.

Setting up the connection

1. On the PC, return to the Control Panel.
2. Double click on Network Connections.
3. Click on the link to Create a New Connection.
4. A Network Connection Wizard will appear, click on Next.
5. Tick to select Connect to the Internet.
6. Click on Next.
7. Tick to select Set up my connection manually.
8. Click on Next.
9. Tick to select Connect using a dial-up modem.
10. Click on Next.
11. Check the box to select only the SAMSUNG CDMA Modem.
12. Click on Next.
13. For the ISP Name, type CNG GPRS.
14. Click on Next.
15. Type *99# for the Phone number.
16. Click on Next.
17. Enter ISP@CINGULARGPRS.COM in the User name field.
18. Enter CINGULAR1 in the Password and Confirm password fields.
19. Check to select from the available options below and click on Next.
20. Click on Finish to complete the setup.

Please don’t use these instructions but rather go to the Cingular site yourself and put in your details.

The long and the short of this is it works. Hooray!