All Posts Tagged With: "iPhone 3G"

This is just plain wrong, especially to all those who waited hours to get their hands on one and others who wanted one but didn’t get one because they sold out…

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Another Monday morning and another “I’ve got nothin’” post. Here it is Monday morning, the first day after a weekend break and I feel more worn out this morning than I did going into the weekend. It was a busy, busy weekend. Friday was spent packing up for our big move to our new offices (moving from one floor to a newly renovated floor three floors up). Saturday was spent largely at the mall, as described in my last post. Yesterday was spent setting my new office back up so that I could get started back on projects first thing this morning.

I had intended to post pictures of my old office and my new office, but I just didn’t get around to it. Perhaps this evening or tomorrow morning. I had also intended to write more about my new iPhone 3G and/or the iPhone 2.0 firmware upgrade with its new features, but I just haven’t dedicated the time to write. It’s not that I have writer’s block, but rather energy block — I’m just flat spent.

So, sorry for wasting your time with this blog post, but that’s all I got this morning.

Well… I didn’t have to wait too long after yesterday’s post for gratification. I couldn’t help myself. There were two irresistibly strong urges pulling me — one was a father’s love for his daughter and deep desire to bring them joy; the other was a gadget junkie’s lust for the next cool thing. Typically, I can resist one or the other on their own; but both forces acting upon me at the same time is hard to resist for very long. The more difficult of the two for me to resist would have to be wanting to make my daughters happy.

You see, if you haven’t been following along, my daughters are getting their very own iPhones, albeit the hand-me-downs from Karla and me. They were beyond excitement when I made the announcement a few weeks back. They were just as excited about the iPhone 3G launch date as Karla and I were because they knew it meant they were going to finally get iPhones, which they’ve been envying ever since I got my first one over a year ago. As a father, I truly love to give my daughters surprises and gifts and generally bring joy into their lives. It was that love for them that compelled me to do something I hate (hate, hate, hate) to do — wait in long lines.

Yesterday after lunch, we headed to Penn Square Mall to buy Sarah new prescription eyeglasses. After we were done there, we decided to see what the line was like at the Apple Store. It was long… again… but not nearly as bad as on Friday. We heard some people walking by say that it was taking about two hours to get through the line. I wasn’t excited about waiting in line for that long. But I looked at the pleading eyes of my two daughters and felt the prodding of my inside, gadget-junkie voice and relented. (Plus it meant I wouldn’t have to brave that insane Penn Square Mall parking lot again for a while!)

We joined the queue and begin our wait. The girls’ excitement made the wait much more tolerable. While we waited, Apple Store employees passed out bottled water as well as some candy treats, which was a pleasant surprise and quite nice. The line moved pretty quickly for a time and then seemingly stalled for a period of time. The closer we got, the slower the line seemed to move, until all of a sudden it seemed to move pretty quickly again.

One hour and 35 minutes after getting into line, we were entering the Apple Store. The employees were very nice and attentive. (One of the employees helping us turned out to be one of Ashley’s teachers next year! He teaches the Yearbook class that Ashley was so excited to get into for this coming year.) The process was fairly painless and 20 minutes later we were out with two new iPhone 3G’s. Phew! Finally!

We returned home and began the process of getting the two new iPhones set up, erasing our old iPhones and then getting them set up for the girls. By bedtime several hours later, everyone had working iPhones. And to see the joy on their faces made every second standing in line and every penny spent well worth it to me.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about our new iPhones in the coming days, but I have to cut this post off here so that I can get ready to go to my new office to get it set up so I can hit the ground running tomorrow morning. Busy, busy, busy!

If you happened to watch my Twitter feed yesterday (that shows up under “What’s Brad doing?” at the top of the right sidebar), you would have seen that I ventured over to the Apple Store in Penn Square Mall yesterday over an early lunch over to see what was going on and if I might be able to get my hands on the new iPhone 3G. This video will give you some idea of what I found when I got there …

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Now, to be honest, I was generally expecting a long line, but (foolishly) optimistically hoping for the best. What I found was just about the opposite of “best.” The line stretched from the Apple store all the way to Dillards (in the same wing of the mall near the west exit) and back around again to around to the stores across from the Apple Store. And the line was hardly moving at all… more than three hours after the store had opened. I knew the wait would be longer than I was willing to tackle, so I quickly abandoned that idea (because I hate waiting in long lines) and met Karla for lunch.

When I got back to the office, I was glad I didn’t bother. There were cascading delays on launch day with people having to wait even longer — much longer — than expected as the Apple activiation servers crashed and burned several extended times throughout the day and the iPhones couldn’t be activated or took a very long time to complete the process. I later heard that some people waited 4 to 6 hours (after the store had opened and the line began moving) before it was all said and done. Even as a diehard Apple fan and iPhone lover, there’s no way I would tolerate that kind of wait, and I didn’t and chose to wait another day. Delayed gratification — for me, for Karla and for the girls, who are inheriting our hand-me-down first-generation iPhones.

Now, Apple just didn’t plan this out very well, in my humble opinion Continued

As of this post, we’re now less than 24 hours away from the official launch of the iPhone 3G. I can barely contain myself — and my daughters are similarly antsy since they are inheriting Karla’s and my first generation iPhones.

I’m coming up blank about anything specific to write this morning. I’m tired of reading, talking and writing about anything related to the campaign (even though I posted something last night related  to it); there’s a ton of stuff I could share, including some really good stuff, but I’m pretty darn sure that most of my six or seven readers are tired of hearing about it too. At the same time, we’re kind of in a dead zone with entertainment, so I don’t have much to share there.

Meanwhile, I’ve been unintentionally obsessing over Apple’s upcoming release of the iPhone 3G, new iPhone 2.0 software update that introduces many new features and the new MobileMe service — a significant upgrade of the .Mac (dot Mac) service. The software and service upgrades alone are exciting, introducting a feature that’s most important to me that I used to have with my Blackberry — Push technology that instantly delivers emails (rather than waiting for the periodic checking of email) — and also offering instant, continual updates of calendar items and contact information to all my devices, from my computer at work to my computer to my constantly mobile iPhone. And the iPhone 3G has the faster 3G data speeds which I’ve been pining for since I got my current iPhone and should make internet usage less frustrating. Plus, the new iPhone 3G is even cooler than my already cool current iPhone, which one of my daughters will inherit once I get my hands on the new 3G. As of this post, there’s a little more than 24 hours until the official launch; Karla and I will likely test the waters about lunchtime to see if we can get into the Apple Store at Penn Square Mall, but if the line is too long, we’ll just wait.

If that wasn’t enough to occupy my mind, we’re getting ready to move offices at work. Our department plus another department and several others will be moving from the 8th floor to the 11th floor in newly renovated offices. My new office furniture is already sitting in my new office (and it’s cool and I’ll share pictures of the whole experience this weekend or Monday morning). Now I have to concentrate on packing up stuff in my current office while still trying to get several projects finished. It’ll probably be a long day tomorrow getting everything ready while working around my workload; I have to have everything done before I leave Friday evening because the movers get started first thing Saturday morning. Sunday, my entourage (Karla, Sarah and Ashley) and I will go up to my office to set everything up and put everything in its place so that I can get started back on my project list first thing Monday morning. It’ll be a long and busy weekend!

Okay, so it turns I really did have something to write about. Lucky you! 

For Apple enthusiasts like myself, the big day is almost here. As of this post, there is now less than 3 days until the iPhone 3G becomes available. (You’ll find my continually updating countdown widget in the sidebar.) People began lining up last week at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York. Now, I’m not that crazy, mostly because I hate waiting in lines. However, I am already making plans to head to the Apple Store over my lunch hour on Friday to see how crazy everything is and if I might be able to secure a new iPhone 3G on the first day!

Until then, I’ll be waiting… and watching… The Final Countdown … which reminds me of another 80s classic Continued