OK, so I caved in. I could have bought one in the States and knobbled it, I could have waited six months for a 3G version, I could have bought something far better spec'd for far less or I could have ignored all the nonsense and carried on with my beaten up Sony Ericsson.
Instead, I went to the O2 store in Notting Hill on Friday after work: straight in, no queue, five minutes, job done. Bob is, as they say, your Dad's brother.
The delight is not in the smugness of having one, but really the pleasure of using something with such beautiful, logical, uncluttered design. That's it. I intend to absolutely hammer it in every way to get my money's worth. It will be road tested and a half.
I know it's very uncool to support proprietary systems, but I'm one of those freaks that uses Apple Mail, iCal, and Apple's address book. It's all sync'd between home and work and backed up on my iPod for good measure. That means I have all 2,000 contacts with me wherever I am, so imagine my delight when I sync'd up my iPhone this weekend and now have all those numbers in phone-able format. Very, very sexy.
Various estimates are being made about the number of iPhones that were sold this weekend. The Mirror estimated sales at "4.2 per second" at the peak, according to paidContent UK, and this story seems to predict sales of 470,000 before Christmas. The numbers are interesting, but as Stephen Fry pointed out the significance is more about its impact on a market that really needed shaking up a bit.
"Whatever your view on Apple's new instant icon, you will not be able to deny that it has already changed forever what was already a colossal market.
"There was pre-iPhone and there will be post-iPhone. All the competitors will have to come up with something better. I'm no red in tooth and claw capitalist, but actually, I can't think this example of mercantile evolution-through-competition is so very bad."
Update: I should add that I've already found a bug: Safari wouldn't action clicks on links, so I had to restart. Apparently that has happened on the iPod Touch too.
