iPhone Experiences and Reviews

One day after the iPhone release, and the reviews and impressions are rolling in. Reader reviews are being posted to this thread with other areas for iPhone Accessory, iPhone Application, iPhone Help/Troubleshooting discussion. We've also had regional discussion about buying an iPhone at the Apple Store, with our own Katie's buying experience at https://www.geekwebguides.com/iphone

Despite with what appears to be a high number of sales, iPhones are still available at most Apple Stores (check availability) -- though we have heard that several AT&T stores sold out last night due to minimal inventory.

John Gruber posted his first impressions of the device:

Overall day one impression: the iPhone is 95 percent amazing, 5 percent maddening. Im just blown away by how nice it is very thoughtful UI design and outstanding engineering. It is very fun.

I havent found a single element of the iPhone UI that doesnt feel super-snappy.
Can rotate to landscape in either direction.
Notes app is lame (photo)
Calendar is "very nice".
"When youre done with an app, you just tap the Home button. What happens to apps when you do this is not exposed; theres no concept of quitting or closing, just switching. I think this is a great design, Im just having trouble getting used to it."

Support pages at Apple with tech notes and troubleshooting have appeared. The biggest issue that has plagued people has been activation problems. Users have been discussing the problem, but Tech-Recipes spoke to AT&T support last night who unhelpfully advised: "they were having bugs with validation and that we should retry every 30 minutes or so until it works."

More galleries: Disassembly photos from ThinkSecret, ZDNet Unboxing.

Web developers can take note that Ajaxian.com has compiled some impressions of the Safari browser with respect to web development:
Safari sets default width as 980px if width not set.
Drag / drop elements based on mousemove events don't work since dragging one finger around causes iPhone Safari to scroll
You do not get mousedown when you touch the screen. You get mousedown and mouseup at the same time when you release your finger. The mousemove event does not seem to fire at all.

Perhaps most interesting is that PCWorld has tried its own stress tests on the iPhone (Video). They put the iPhone through Scratch Tests and Drop Tests.

Scratch Test: When the iPhone emerged with its screen just as pristine as when it went in, we then attempted to gouge the screen with one of the keys. We were very impressed that even this deliberate attempt to scratch the screen completely failed.

Drop Test: The iPhone not only continue to work after each drop test, impressively it still looked good as well. The only obvious damage suffered was a few gouges along its metal edge from the concrete drops. But it came out without a scratch on its glass screen, despite our best efforts to mar it in repeated tests of both types.

We'll be compiling ongoing iPhone notes and developments at https://www.geekwebguides.com/iphone/