FedEx man came to my house yesterday morning, bearing a box from Apple, via China, Hong Kong and Alaska. Inside it was my iPhone. Oh, yes. And I opened the box and saw the gleaming, black screen. Lust. I hooked it up and set about activating it via iTunes. After going through the whole process, I was told that it couldn’t activate it, and I needed to visit an AT&T store. Uncool. But, actually, we needed to visit an AT&T store anyway, because we needed to get my wife a new phone and switch her over to the AT&T network, so we could get a family plan. Thus, it wasn’t a tragedy that it couldn’t activate via iTunes, but it was sort of a downer.

So we went to our nearest store and got mucho help from a lovely lady called Carolyn. We got Tammy a new phone + accessories and got the account setup. Carolyn gave me a special code for activation, but since the account was already setup, iTunes didn’t need it any more. It still wasn’t instant activation; I got a message saying that my activation required “more time” and they would email me when it was done. It took about an hour.

So then it was activated and working. I got my number transferred from Verizon and I am happy. I played with it almost constantly for about three hours last night, whilst sitting in my luxurious, leather recliner. I was having DSL problems lat night, so it would switch between using my WiFi and the EDGE network without missing more than a beat. Nice. I love the integration between your contacts and Google maps, and the Safari browser is cool.

Now we just need Apple to give us a real SDK for writing real apps.