Hands-On With Apple's iPhone (Updated with Video)

Apple iPhone

Apple iPhone

Apple iPhone

[Check out our in-depth review of the Apple iPhone here. Skip to the third page of this story to see videos of the Apple iPhone in action. -editor]

Well, the revolution has begun. The Apple iPhone has been on sale for a few hours, and here are our first photos of this lovely device.

We waited in line for about an hour today and managed to get one of the 4GB models - all of the 8GB models had sold out by the time we got to the front of the queue. Our AT&T store in the local mall received, I estimate, 36 8GB and 12 4GB iPhones. The manager wouldn't/couldn't comment on how many units they received, but did tell us when the supplies were running low, allowing me to do a bit of quick math to come up with a reasonable guess.

There was some confusion during the purchase process for many. Kids under 18 needed to have a parent with them, and one poor kid, who's father was late, had to let others pass him in line as he waited. Another young man was turned down completely when he got to the counter because he wanted to pay with cash and was not an existing AT&T customer. New AT&T customers had to pay with credit cards, the manager told us. We also ran into a problem of our own: there was no credit authorization number on our receipt, as there was to be. But, considering how little time everybody had to prepare, I suppose problems like this are to be expected.

Some people were less lucky than we were. We called a number of AT&T stores before we set out today and found out that some stores did not have any iPhones at all, though they did have a line of people standing outside. Imagine how mad those people were when they found out they had waited in line for the privilege of ordering the phone instead of walking home with one.

But we had a phone, thankfully. We actually activated the iPhone from the parking lot of the mall, thanks to a laptop and a Verizon EV-DO data card. The process was pretty straight forward and took about 6 or 7 minutes from start to end. The only problem we had was that iTunes did not sync my Outlook calendar and contacts, like it claimed it was doing. The bookmarks from my copy of Internet Explorer did copy over, though. I'll have to sort through this issue later, but by then we were simply anxious to start playing with the phone.

[A later attempt to sync got the contacts over, but the calendar still remains empty. -editor]

Startup screen

Cover flow in iPod

AutoCorrect text input

Photo transitions