It's Here! It's Here! Read all about it...

Upon arrival at my unnamed employer's office a couple of weeks ago, there was a package waiting in my mailbox. One that I had eagerly awaited for 5 days.

My new iPhone 3GS had arrived.

I opened the box like a lost Christmas present that had been found, wrapped and unopened, awaiting my eagerness to unearth whatever lies beneath. A careful slice of the packing tape with my Leatherman and behold! There it was! My first reaction:

"Is this it?"

You see, the iPhone comes in the typical nifty Apple "minimized" packaging. No frills, no excessive waste on a huge box with such small, precious cargo inside. I was amazed at how small the box truly was. My retired BlackBerry didn't come in nearly such a small, neat box. After wiping the drool off my chin and getting the shift-change briefing, I finally read through the instructions to get the phone activated so I could start playing with all the features.

I was prepared to wait amongst the throngs of people flooding the AT&T support lines to activate the plethora of iPhones that seem to be flying off the shelf. Sure enough, I get on the phone, enter my customer number, and the automated voice stated "All our operators are busy serving other customers. We apologize for this and your estimated wait time is........20 minutes." Eh, not too bad so I was preparing to put the call on speakerphone so I wouldn't have to hold my neck sideways for that amount of time. HOWEVER, a series of beeps occurred and then a new voice came on the line.

"Welcome to the AT&T Premier activation system. Please choose from the following menu." Whaaaaaaaaaaa? Sure enough, the privilege of having a corporate discount came to the rescue and I was able to bypass the 20 minute wait and activate my phone all within 5 minutes. Sweeeeeet. After taking one long last look at the BlackBerry that had served my friend and I well for 3 1/2 years, I switched it off and took the leap into the iPhone era.

The 5 minutes after switching the phone off seemed to take forever. After 5 minutes and 3 seconds (had to be SURE we had passed 5 minutes), I hit the button on the iPhone and the familiar Apple logo popped up. I then synced to my laptop to register the phone with Apple, an all too easy process. The only issue that came up was trying to sync my music as it resides on an external hard drive I typically keep on my desktop. A quick cancellation of the sync and we were off and running.

As for the phone itself, the learning curve and transition from a BlackBerry to the iPhone was quite seamless. My biggest worry was changing from a positive-response keyboard like the blackberry has to the iPhone touch screen but this wasn't as big of a deal as I thought it would be. Especially nice is the landscape mode which provides some extra real estate and allows for larger "keys". The screen is nice and bright but not quite as bright as one of my co-worker's BlackBerry Bold, and the width and depth feel a bit narrow compared to the 8820. Controls took a bit of getting used to; the volume controls were in a slightly different location, the ring/vibrate switch is a change, and my hands-free headsets will no longer work (note: I'm not keen on using Bluetooth headsets both from a security point of view and high-frequency radio waves transmitting awefully close to my gray matter...regardless of how fast the power decays once it leaves the antenna).

The biggest draw to the iPhone was the plethora of applications available which blow away anything available on the BlackBerry. The first apps I downloaded were RadarScope, Bejeweled, Facebook, Lightsaber (hey, you never know when you will run into a Dark Sith), and MotionX GPS. By far, RadarScope has been the most used app as I can finally get (relatively) high-resolution radar data out and about. Whenever family calls, I can finally be able to tell them whether or not to batten down the hatches or be free to roam about without being hammered by mother nature with better accuracy than other radar sites available. MotionX GPS was handy on a recent trip to Colorado by providing elevation information while off-roading in the mountains and will come in handy with future stormchasing and damage surveys. I'm sure there are a few more gems of applications but you have to wade through hundreds, if not thousands, of rifraf applications to find them.

Unfortunately I do have a few gripes. Battery life S T I N K S. Only recently have I had the phone last for about two and a half days as opposed to needing a nightly recharge. A few days on vacation I had to charge it twice a day. Call sound quality is also highly variable with some calls barely audible while others coming in as if they were being fed through an amplifier. Using the included earbuds helped mainly while on the road but has come in handy when at the house and needing to put the phone down to type or look something up. The phone also gets a bit warmer than I thought it would when being used for a long period of time (playing Bejeweled). Preferring to see if it overheats, I did get the white iPhone as a couple of blogs indicate the plastic can turn purple if it does indeed get too hot.

However, I'm quite pleased with the iPhone over all (not to mention the $$ I'm saving on not having a tethered data plan...for now). If Beejive would hurry up and get Jabber chat rooms working, if someone would develop a programmable app to plot weather data/satellite data, and XM/Sirius would decide to allow current customers to listen to their account as opposed to paying extra, I would have almost all of the apps I'd need. The phone is also wrapped in it's Otterbox Defender case to protect it from falls (already happened once), the elements (NOTE: it's not waterPROOF, but weather RESISTANT), and has a nifty belt attachment that fits on my hip like the old BlackBerry holster preventing me from going off-balance.

If anything else changes or a new app comes along, I'll be sure to share. And yes, I'm slowly falling to the Apple dark side...