My Husband Went to the Apple Store…

… and all I got was this bricked iPhone.

You may have heard something or other about a phone that got released today? I didn't even go stand in line, bad tech blogger that I am, but my husband gleefully stood in line for nearly four hours to get his phone, and surprised me with one (even after my well-documented complaints) as well thanks to the largesse of a gift certificate that had been planned for the pre-3G phone pricing.

A summary of iPhone purchase stories:

• Duncan Riley got his iPhone before pretty much everyone. He reported no line and simply walking into a phone shop and buying it. His unboxing video on Vimeo was picked up by Gizmodo since everyone in the U.S. had to wait.
• Jordan Golson took a trip to the Boston Apple Store and got kicked out of the store for his trouble. Long lines, but plenty of room in the store.
• Robert Scoble and his son checked out the San Francisco lines and spotted the Venture Beat team with donuts.
• Carla Thompson woke up early and had her phone in hand even before Corvida, who had an hour's head start. Corvida discovered that supplies at smaller stores were limited, and had nearly a full day of video, including trips to two stores.
• Mitch Wagner had a day of it, posting his experiences on Twitter over about seven hours of standing in line. In his line, people were walking the line selling their spots close to the entrance. (Scoble apparently got to cut in his line, a bonus of weblebrity status).

My husband left rather late, and ended up in line at the mall waiting for the Apple Store to open. While some stores were rumored to have let the phones go out the door without being activated when the servers went down, here they simply held everyone up, resulting in over four hours in line for him to get the phones, then several more hours of attempting to connect to the iTunes store at home in order to get the phones synced with our laptops and actually up and running.

Tomorrow I'll do reviews of the iPhone App Store, as well as some of the apps designed specifically for the iPhone, including Loopt, an iPhone-specific Twitterific, Evernote, and a few others.