I got an iPhone 3G on Friday, and I’m really quite happy with it now. It wasn’t an easy process, however; the closest store to my house claimed to have 10 units in total, and so, reasoning that there weren’t any bigger stores closer by, and that there were people waiting overnight at the main Toronto store, I decided to head for the main store. They should have plenty on hand, I thought, or at least if they don’t have enough I’ll know at 8am-ish, so I’ll have plenty of time to find a smaller store with no lineup by 10am when the other stores opened.

So, I queued up with a bunch of other folks on Friday outside the Rogers store at Yonge & Dundas, with all the press & suchlike. I arrived at 6:15am, and left — with an 8GB iPhone 3G, thankfully — at about 4:45pm. For most of the afternoon, I was less than 20 yards from the door of the Rogers store, watching one person go in about every 30-45 minutes or so.

The technical issues surrounding the launch are well-known by now. However, the flagship store didn’t seem to be able to sort out what they could do to alleviate this. Maybe because they were such an important store, with lots of press stood outside, they didn’t do anything until they got an explicit go-ahead from Corporate. For, those who turned up at Sherway Gardens at 9:30am were given numbered tickets referring to their place in line for the 50-odd 8GB and 12-odd 16GB they had in stock. All before the store opened. It was gone 2pm at Dundas & Yonge before the same thing was done there, at which point most people had simply given up or had to leave for work. To my knowledge, only one person was able to reserve a phone before that point, a 16GB white model. As far as I could tell, he had begun queueing the previous evening, and had quite possibly got into the store & sat there waiting for his order to process & activate before having to leave for work.

So, at about 7:30am the queue began to move forward somewhat. It moved in a few spurts of about 10-20 people it seemed. Presumably the first few were being moved around a bit for the benefit of the press. The photograph on this article was taken around 9am I think, at which point we’d just passed the corner — I’m the chap in the center of the picture facing away from the camera, with the shoulder-bag. From that point on it took an hour or more to pass between each of the cement columns bordering the windows you can see there. By 2pm we had reached the edge of the Rogers store. Yep, five hours later.

At around 2:30 they started handing out business cards upon which they’d written the IMEI codes of the phones they had in stock. They also revealed that they had been receiving more phones throughout the day, albeit only the 8GB models. And so it was that, around 3:30pm as I waited, next in line to enter the store, that a bunch of other people turned up and were able to join the queue & buy their iPhones right away. In fact, while I was on hold for the Hardware Upgrade process, they managed to finish processing two or three of the people who’d only just showed up.

Still, I left in the end with an 8GB model — the same capacity as my first-generation iPhone from the US — at around 4:45pm, so it all turned out well enough in the end.

So far, I’ve been generally impressed with the phone. I’ve been using an original iPhone since October of last year, so the general experience was nothing particularly new. However, I’d agree that the general feel of the device is a little better than the earlier model. The plastic back and the curved edges reduce the effect of the phone’s rectangular shape, and help it to feel a little smaller when you’re holding it up to your ear.

The GPS function is very useful, when it works properly; sometimes Google Maps just fails to get my location, and only a reboot of the phone will make it work. This is especially annoying when you’re using this while driving (for instance, to stop the damned thing telling you to drive 30km on a toll road by driving partway before asking for directions). I’m not sure exactly what happens here — presumably a system service is failing, or it may be linked to another app having crashed at some point (like when the loginwindow crashes on OS X and drag & drop stops working for apps which were running earlier).

The app store is good, and I’ve downloaded a few things already — purchased a couple of games, downloaded some free apps. In fact, my only other gripe is the battery life. Over the past couple of days, the iPhone has consistently come close to draining its battery during a single day; this is a lot less than the previous iteration, and is probably down to the increased power drain of the 3G network. However, I’d not expected it to be so severe. Perhaps there is simply something wrong with mine; I’ll have to take a look at the situation in another few days’ time.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I’m very happy to have a proper, legal iPhone. The fact that I can easily use it for development and testing, and that I needn’t wait for the iPhone Dev Team to come up with an unlocker before I can upgrade to the latest software every time, is worth every penny. As someone who never really used the Jailbreak Installer (and who found little software there to get excited about) I don’t find the device at all limiting.

Q ratings

iPhone: 9 out of ten (”pretty darned good”)
Customer Service: 7 out of ten (”friendly and reasonably capable”)
Rogers Network: 2 out of ten (”the IT folks said all systems should be rebooted at once? How will that help bandwidth? Won’t it kill the network all over again?”)