Jesus Phone in hand

As I indicated in a previous post, I planned to get an iPhone 4. I pre-ordered it, but since I was late to the party, it wasn't going to arrive until July 15th or so. I had wanted it sooner as I was going on 2 trips before then; I don't travel all that much, so having it would have been convenient.

I tried Wal-Mart, but they didn't have any on launch day. So, on Thursday night, right before the Apple Store closed in Fashion Valley, I called and asked about stock. The guy I spoke to said that they should get more on Friday and people would be lining up before they opened at 8 am. So, I decided to give it a try on Friday. I arrived at around 8:05 am and got in line. The employees that came out indicated that they had stock, so I waited. I spent about an hour and 10 minutes in line and finally got in the store. It took about another 15-20 minutes to process my order and I was out the door with my phone.

So I bought into the hype and lined up for a phone; however, I didn't line up at 5 am like other people did. Apple constrains supply and I think fudges numbers to get on the news, which is what happened. If Apple had stock to sell me, why couldn't they ship me a phone and have it delivered the day after launch? I guess that wouldn't get them the free publicity.

Now that I have my phone in hand, I'm reasonably impressed with it. I'm less impressed with AT&T and their coverage, but we'll see how that goes. I did find what I consider to be a very annoying bug with the cellular radio in the phone; if you go out of coverage area for an extended period of time, the phone stops searching for a signal. I had to put it into airplane mode and then turn off airplane mode to get it to search again. I understand power conservation, but you'd think that it would simply try less often to get a signal. What is also strange is that I had coverage, went inside a building, completely lost coverage (the building was a wood framed building, I believe) and never got a signal back. Someone else next to me had a Palm Treo on AT&T and had 2 bars of coverage.

Comments

July 3rd, 2010
Tyler C

Wow, the fact you were able to get into line at 8 am and still walk out of there with a phone in such a short period of time is pretty amazing. A friend of mine waited for a grand total of 13 hours before he was able to walk out the door with his new iPhone, but this was in Manhattan Beach, California. Glad you’re enjoying it, it truly is a gorgeous piece of hardware.