I joined the cool brigade and bought an iPhone Friday night. Overall, it is an incredible device totally worth the large price tag (but worth is certainly a relative term).

I want to be brief with my comments on the device, but basically there are no significant issues other than third-party support, which seems to closer to reality every day, and the iTunes requirement (I despise this software).

The GUI is fantastic, touch screen incredible, screen resolution amazing, applications wonderful, size great, etc. Most of my initial issues with the iPhone washed away once I played with it a bit more and became aware of how to do certain tasks or find certain information; it wasn’t that these things were hidden or are hard to get to, just that I hadn’t paid enough attention.

I was surprised at the speed of the EDGE, which is about twice as fast as dialup, and activation was flawless (I was totally up and running in less than 15 minutes; note that I was and am an AT&T customer).

The one significant problem I had was connecting to my secured WiFi network. Passcodes required nuanced entering depending on whether they are ASCII or hex, and nearly all the information I found online about how to enter the information was using the network connection interface for firmware 1.0.0, which is a bit different than 1.0.1. In the end, don’t forget to reboot your router!

The one definite improvement I would like is that Safari would (1) continue loading a page when you switch to a new browser window so you don’t have to wait around and (2) not reload the page you were last on.