I picked up an iphone tonight at the apple store in the mall. Yay new toy. The setup process was pretty simple. In fact, I feel comfortable stating that this cellphone purchase was absolutely the most pleasant cellular experience I've had.

1. Go to Apple store.
2. Say "I want to buy an iPhone"
3. Someone hands you a box with an iPhone in it. You pay.
4. Go home, plug iPhone into PC.
5. Run iTunes. Follow the trivially simple activation steps(*)
6. Rejoice now that your iPhone is activated without ever having to deal with morons at the AT&T retailers

(*) My desire to keep my current Cingular AT&T account was satisfied. I was presented with the option of transfering my current service to the new phone. It even set me up with a data plan. Pretty hassle-free.

Much love to Apple for making me not have to talk to anyone at the AT&T retail stores.

• Uploading photos to flickr is the same as my previous phone: emailing photos to flickr
• meebo.com (web2.0fancy instant messenger gateway) happily works on the iphone.
• google reader works too

Comes standard with a google maps and youtube apps.

Fancy. The first two project ideas that came to mind are a both remote-control tools. One for a universal remote (basically smash buttons on a webpage tells an IR emitter to do things) and one to remotely control a PC (mouse, keyboard, etc). I'm guessing there will be a VNC client for the iphone out very shortly after the Apple SDK is released, so I'll think about the infrared remote control project.