1. App Store.  The new Apple App Store provides hundreds of third-party applications for the iPhone. These increase the value of the device, and let you customize it to suit your needs.  There’s no reason most iPhone users need LightSaber (a free addon that makes light saber sounds when you swing the phone around), but it’s mission-critical for a big nerd like me.
2. GPS.  The new iPhone GPS works flawlessly.  I have another GPS that’s useful, but it’s a dedicated device.  The iPhone can tag your photos with lat/long information about where the pic was taken.  That kind of integration is sweet.  The map also works well.  We were headed to a friend’s house for the first time, so I popped out the phone, it found where I was, and I asked how to get to my friend’s house.  It tracked our progress, and I could see clearly what to do next.  There’s even a “Where’d I park?” application that you can use to tag the location of your car before consuming expensive beer at a ball game.  Excellent, and included with a device I already have.
3. Integration.  I was able to easily install iTunes on my WinXP laptop and synch my Outlook contacts & calendar in to the phone.  Doing this with Windows Mobile and Palm has been much harder with past devices.  I think I’ll now move from iPhone to Google contacts & calendar, but haven’t really decided yet.  (One thing that annoyed me is that my Windows 2000 machine isn’t supported by iTunes, but I’m seeing more and more of that, so it didn’t frustrate me all that much.)
4. Web Browser.  This thing runs Safari, a full-featured web browser.  It does fancy CSS and JavaScript things my Windows Mobile phone balked at.  It also has “tabbed” browsing, so I can have several browser windows open at the same time.  This is both great and implemented very well.
5. YouTube.  iPhone YouTube isn’t terribly “useful”, but at my son’s baseball game last weekend, someone mentioned a video they’d seen online that was hillarious.  I had it up on the phone in 30 seconds.
6. Visual Voicemail.  If you haven’t seen an iPhone before, “visual voice mail” might be new.  When you have voice mail, it shows up in a list like email would.  You click ‘play’ to listen, and can act on the voicemail in the obvious ways.  The cool thing is that you can rewind the voicemail easily and write down information from it without having to replay the whole thing.  Excellent.
7. Pandora. I’m a big fan of www.pandora.com, which is a free site that lets you build custom “radio stations” to listen to whatever kind of music you want.  When someone mentions a new band I want to check out, I always head to Pandora.  Now I have it on my iPhone, streaming personalized music free over my WiFi or 3G.
8. WiFi. The iPhone does a great job of getting on to WiFi networks, and it saves a lot of battery life relative to 3G.
9. Other Apps. A few other favorite apps I’ve tried so far:

• Facebook: Not full-featured, but lets you update your status, see others’ status, chat, and use the fb inbox.
• NearPics: Shows pictures taken near your current location.  Can’t wait to use this when I’m in DC soon.  It’s pretty slow currently, though.
• Karajan: Ear training software.  I still have trouble telling a 4th from a 5th, but I’m getting better.  My wife is so embarrased by this, because she’s taken semester after semester of ear training & sight singing classes at conservatories.  She’s an ear snob.
• Yelp: Nice application for finding things near where you are.  Works great for finding an interesting lunch place in a new part of town.

So, I’m still loving the iPhone thing.

But I did.

I showed up around 8am at the local Apple store, and saw the line stretching around the block.  My first impulse was to turn around and go home, but I figured I’d hang out for a while and see how the line was moving, at least.  So I lined up with the other mostly not- or self-employed folks to see how our luck fared.

The Apple guys said they would take groups of 10 in, and each group would take about 20 minutes.  True to form, every 20 minutes or so, we’d move forward 10 people or so.  The sense of progress was nice for perhaps an hour and a half.  Then everything stopped.  We had another couple of hours to go that we could see, and for a solid hour, nothing moved.  Apparently, iTunes crashed, so they couldn’t activate the phones.

Ugh.

Then they worked around that, and the AT&T servers died for a while, so they couldn’t do anything at all.  Double ugh.

At about the point where I’d given up and was ready to leave, the line started moving again, and they were clearly selling phones once more.  This was perhaps 3 hours into the ordeal.  All this time, of course, I’m surrounded by the Apple Faithful, extolling the virtues of the iPhone, and Apple in general.  They did really make it easy to stick around, seeing the crazy energy and enthusiasm.

But by this point, we were clearly an hour from being in the store, and I’d already planned to waste the rest of the day playing with the phone, so it didn’t make any difference really whether I waited or played.  So I stuck around.

Once we were just a few people back from the store, we found out that once in the store, it was another hour to get the phone.  I assumed that only a bit of this was in a new, air-conditioned, line, but that was wrong.  It was another hour inside the store just to get started buying the phone.

Once I was in the buying process, we had various gift card-related problems that were quickly resolved, then I asked the nice lady for my new 16 gig iPhone.  She went and got it, then plopped it in the special iPhone bag, along with the case I’d picked out.  Sweet.

We completed the activation process, got my number ported over, then she rang up the total.  It was $100 too low.  So I mentioned to her that I wasn’t getting the smaller 8 gig model, but the big one.  She looked in the bag, and was crestfallen as she, and I, realized that everything was lost.  She’d completely activated the 8 gig iPhone.  The number had moved over to it, and getting a 16 gig was out of the question for about 2 years, unless I wanted to pay the unsubsidized $200-more price.

ARGH.  6 hours in line so I could get the wrong phone.  Thanks?

In the end, I opted for the 8 gig.  It’s $100 less (which I’m now stuck with in Apple Gift Card form, which wasn’t what I really wanted), and may present some storage challenges if I really load it down with applications.

But still, a day later, I have to wonder:  Was it worth 6 hours and a sunburn (oops!) to get this phone?  Pretty much.  The interface is stellar, it’s fast, it has great WiFi support, the 3G is faster than EVDO, the GPS is great, and the App Store presents a new world of mobile possibilities.

So, would I wait in line for 6 hours for an iPhone?  Not knowingly.  But having done it, I don’t regret it.  Much.