FoxBoom!

As the obnoxious bag it came in tells me, I’ve “got it”. But rather than “it” being something as pedestrian as, say, syphilis or a Segway, it’s an iPhone.

A quick note for O2 staff: it’s a little worrying when you respond to “I’d like to buy an iPhone please” with “A what?”. And whilst I appreciate you taking the time to share your sales script with me, I’m afraid there really isn’t a polite way of saying “dude, I’ve been obsessing over this thing on the Internet for months — just take my fucking card and let me pay”, so I apologise if I came off a little short.

But now I have it! And so far, I think one of the smallest design considerations has impressed me the most; when I got home, I had a moment of dread when I realised the activation process would probably need to know my O2 account details (at least an account reference or something) to transfer my existing number, and I had no idea where all that paperwork was. I figured I’d go through the process up until that point, then try to find what I needed. But — joy to Apple’s work-out-of-the-box mentality! — when I chose to move my existing number to the iPhone, it asked for that number, then SMSed a PIN to it to prove I own it. When I entered that same PIN back in, that was proof enough and the iPhone was activated.

Whew!

In a nutshell, it’s awesome. I still need to figure out a cool way of using my del.icio.us bookmarks on it, since I don’t use Safari and thus syncing with its bookmarks is not useful. Gmail works beautifully without any fucking around, and the built-in calendar is kinda redundant when Google Calendar works so well and puts my events on the web too. Google Reader formats itself well for the iPhone, but it’s a tad confusing.

Everything else works as well as everyone else has already said. I get on very well with the keyboard and the camera is great as a portable (but then, I have a Canon 20D in tow for anything that matters). And with mad props to the BBC News team, my first SMS message was “my shoe is beef”.