It’s been just about 36 hours since I walked out of the AT&T store in Hoboken with a spanking new iPhone. Since then, I’ve not been able to put it down. Here are my first reactions to using it, much of which has been echoed around the internet.

For starters, this thing is absolutely amazing to use. The overall feeling of elegance and simplicity is overwhelming. Scrolling, changing orientation, using the keyboard; all awesome. Many people have been facing activation issues, but perhaps I got starred early enough to avoid such problems (in before lock!). I had one hangup initially but that worked itself out by going back and trying again. Once I had my new number, I was set to go and began loading my contacts and calendar info onto it. Anyone who knows me and has seen me get a new device knows that all I’ve wanted has been a device that integrates with my system, namely OSX. This has been the device and experience I’ve been waiting for.

Some of you may have also heard me bitch and complain about the Verizon salespeople and the whole phone-buying process. Thank you Apple and AT&T. I felt like I was living in the future when I activated my own phone from home. What a relatively painless experience. Version 2 of that process is going to be sick.

So, I used this new phone all day yesterday, with the exception of a few incoming calls where the calls didn’t have my new number yet (I switched area codes when abandoning Verizon). The calls I made were some of the clearest I’d ever made. It sounded like I was on a landline! And the ease with which you can get to a number and make a call is astonishing.

Since we were out in Montclair for a meeting, I didn’t real know where aything was. We needed a hardware store, so I fired up Google Maps and searched for “hardware 07042″. The map appeared and the little pins fell into place like they do in the ads. I located one that was close, touched the name, touched the number, and their phone began ringing. If AT&T charges money for 411 calls, they’re going to make a lot less money on them now. Instead of talking to a computer to get a number, now I can just use one to get it. Google Maps on the iPhone is clearly the new 411.

Typing is pretty cool too. Using the force is the best way I’ve heard it dscribed. You just need to let go and trust the software. As I typed “device” earlier in this post, I actually keyed in something along the lines of “swcive” and the software recognized a) an error and b) the fact that most of the letters were adjacent to letters that would spell something correctly. Absolutely amazing.

The aforementioned meeting was with a kitchen designer, and she had asked us to take pictures of our existing kitchen conditions so that she could get a sense of our storage needs. So Katie shot a bunch of pix and we downloaded them onto my laptop. I quickly synced them to my iPhone and we were off. As we were all looking through them later on, our designer remarked about how handy this thing was, being able to look a pictures on such a big screen. I responded by saying “oh, it’s the coolest thing in the world,” to which she responded “oh, is that the iPhone?”

John Gruber points out the lack of clipboard functionality and I agree, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass at times. And yes, a dedicated (local) RSS reader would greatly improve the Internet experience. A lack of spam filter on the mail client is becoming quite annoying as well, considering I’m getting more & more spam on my “non-spam” accounts.

I also just noticed a funky quirk, in that it looks like Safari doesn’t properly support overflow. I had been writing this post up until this paragraph on the iPhone, but when I came back after breakfast, I noticed that I couldn’t scroll down to where I had left off. And comparing the WP admin interface in Firefox and iPhone Safari, the categories list also only shows the first N categories without a scrollbar to get to the rest. Maybe I’ll do some tests later to see what the deal is.

Considering everything on the phone is driven by software, just about everything everyone is complaining about thus far (and these are nitpicky details to say the least) should be able to be resolved via a software update, which is really really cool.