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.

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.

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.

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.