Our friend got an iPhone when they first came out last year. He let me play with it a few times… and I got hooked. Every time he came over or I was around him, I’d be all like ‘hand it over’. (What can I say, Jack has turned me into a geeky girl…) I just thought it was the coolest, niftiest thing ever.

I decided I couldn’t live without one. Especially since I was carrying my cell phone, iPod, and a bottle of water on my walks. (iPhones are an iPod, cell phone and much more all-in-one), so a few months ago we started saving and was going to purchase each of us one online through our AT&T account. We were eligible for an upgrade anyway. The only problem was the AT&T online store would only sell us one per household. I was all, “what the hell?” So I did a bit of research and found out the iPhone G3 was coming out soon. So likely AT&T only had a limited number of the old iPhones left and that’s why only one per household was being allowed. So we impatiently patiently waited.

The day the iPhone G3’s came out (Friday, July 11th) also happened to be the day I needed to start work late since I had appointments and such (yes I dragged myself to the doctor despite how I felt about it.) So it worked out perfect.

We ended up being number 35 or 36 or so in line to get an iPhone from the store we waited at. Which is a good thing, considering that store only had 40 to sell on the day of release. There were several upset people behind us. Funny thing about that too: had AT&T and Apple let anyone buy the phones we would not have gotten them. Several people *camped out all night* to buy the phones but had no intention of actually using them. They wanted to sell them on eBay! But activation of the phones was a requirement or you didn’t get one. Meaning, you could not just walk in, buy the phone without an AT&T cellular service plan and walk out. I am glad they did it this way as I would have been pissed if I lost out to someone who only planned on hoarding them to profit on eBay. I know I could have ordered one if we didn’t get one, but we’ve been waiting several months!

I wasn’t too impressed with the initial setup. As with my iPod there’s absolutely no instructions for getting started included with the phone. They have a great user’s guide on the website, but Apple servers were down or bogged down or something that day so I couldn’t even get to the User’s Guide. Technically all you have to do is have iTunes and hook up the phone to your computer and the rest is a snap… but since everything Apple was basically not functioning for me, I didn’t know if it was me or them, if I was doing something wrong, or what. Finally Apple servers started working, I got the phone registered, charged, and was back in business cell phone-wise.

It’s kept me mesmerized ever since.

I’ve downloaded several fun little apps, twitter included, and even used in the built in GPS to help us get to the Survivor open casting call yesterday. I got all excited watching the little blip on the screen move as we did and stop when we did. It was a help getting us where we needed to go too and better still, no more printing out MapQuest directions. I’ll save a ton of paper. (I MapQuest anywhere new we go, or anywhere I’m not 100% sure how to get to.)

There are a few things I don’t like, though:

1. The battery life of the iPhone G3 SUCKS. I was nervous it was just my phone or something but a quick Google search proved that’s about everyone’s complaint with the iPhone. Oh well. It’s got enough charge to work about a day so far. But I’ve also been messing with it constantly.

2. You can’t send multimedia messages. You can email pictures and such, but that’s it. I was totally perturbed by this. Cheap $30 phones can send multimedia messages… but this fancy expensive iPhone can’t? Fortunately another Google search netted me a work around that actually worked when I sent Kayla a picture of her dad doing the try out thing yesterday.

3. Syncing with my GMail contacts was a Very Bad Idea of epic proportions. EPIC. It full of nothing but FAIL. I apparently wasn’t paying attention to how many crap email addresses GMail had collected. People I’ve emailed ONE time, or replied to once… all in my contact list for GMail. I tried to use GMail to consolidate, delete, and sort, but every time I synced I ended up with same contacts but in triplicate on my iPhone. At one point it got so screwed up that the iPhone would only hang when trying to sync my contacts. Google search came to the rescue once again and I could finally sync properly. I then ended up restoring my phone to try to get rid of some of the multiple instances of the same contacts, but that only partially worked. I had to remove them manually myself and I turned off syncing with GMail. I don’t really have that many contacts I want stored in my iPhone anyway. Since it’s super easy to enter in and remove contacts manually, I’ll just keep it that way from now on.

Overall I’m tickled to have this thing and don’t regret the purchase. Of course, I haven’t seen my cell phone bill yet… That may change my mind