By Lauren Hirsch

Ok, I admit it, I stood in line on Friday and waited with all the other Apple fanboys and fangirls to get my grubby little paws on a brand new 3G iPhone.

I’ve had it for the better part of a week now, and here are my impressions:

1.) Activation was a snap. I really don’t know what may have been going on with the AT&T network that day, but it didn’t seem to affect me. I did dodge the setup folks, preferring instead to hook up at home on my own iTunes. Within about 30 seconds, the iPhone blinked on and showed me set to go.

2.) The 3G network is spotty. Despite a very convincing blanket of solid blue on the AT&T website showing my area completely saturated with 3G service, the service itself is rather finicky. The iPhone blinks between EDGE and 3G with a little too much frequency for my taste. 3G coverage is basically nonexistent in any building, covered shelter, tent, or lean-to. However, when you’re locked on to 3G well, the throughput is speedy. YouTube videos load and play with only a few seconds’ delay, and webpages load with speeds akin to my pre-FIOS dsl.

3.) Call quality is excellent when the call stays connected, but for some reason I’m finding many more dropped calls and pockets of no service than I did with my previous iPhone.

4.) Apple seems to have fixed the volume issues that plagued so many first generation iPhone users.

5.) I love GPS. I am falling prey to the initial fascination that befalls in-car GPS users, causing them to look a little too long at the GPS screen and a little too infrequently at the Actual Road. This should improve with time, and hopefully before I cause a major accident. The lack of turn-by-turn directions is not proving too much of a problem. Once you’ve got Google Maps providing the directions, you can easily see if you’ve strayed off the happy blue line. When you’re in reliable 3G coverage, you can use the satellite view, which is very impressive-looking. I’m looking forward to the release of the TomTom navigation application for iPhone. I’m hoping it’ll turn the iPhone into a closer analogue of a standard in-car GPS system.

6.) None of my iPhone charging devices (which were all carryovers from prior iPods) are working. Apparently, the new iPhone has completely eliminated the power paths through the FireWire pins, which permitted charging (but not syncing) through devices that sent the power over the FireWire pins. This is a serious problem, especially considering…

7.) Battery life is alarmingly short. Even with WiFi turned off, a day of somewhat frequent use drains the battery completely by 3 PM. This could prove to be a problem for folks who are looking to treat it as a Blackberry, which requires frequent network connections.

8.) MobileMe has some intriguing possibilities, but is not yet the Gmail-killer it purports to be. If you don’t need push functionality, Gmail calendars and email provides more functionality, and are free. For me, Gmail let me use my own custom domain as an email, and a dumb forward server-side forwarded all emails directly to my Gmail. Mail sent out from Gmail goes out and comes in as if it came from my custom domain. In effect, Gmail serves as an invisible backbone for all my email needs. With MobileMe, while I can create aliases in my desktop Mail program, MobileMe will not allow me to set up any custom domains or aliases so that email is received and sent from anything other than my @me.com address. As a businessperson, I am not about to start using me.com email when my business presence is tied into my existing custom domain. I’ve temporarily solved the problem by leaving my Gmail account (set up with its overlying custom domain email) set up in the iPhone, and with each email I double click on the “from” field and manually change it to my custom domain. Server side, my custom email now dumb forwards to my me.com address. This is not a permanent solution and I await some kind of fix from Apple. It can’t possibly expect users, especially business users, to stop using their own domains.

9.) Similarly, MobileMe calendaring is proving problematic. With Google Calendars, it was incredibly simple, and my iPhone synced to my calendars through subscribing my desktop iCal to the Google Calendars. But while MobileMe provides push calendaring, it won’t push subscribed calendars and won’t permit subscription to its own calendars, making my use of them very limited. I had to turn off push for calendaring and go back to “regular” syncing.

10.) On the flip side, push contacts are great.

11.) MobileMe Gallery is nice, and has that sleek Apple look, but doesn’t provide any additional benefits that you can’t get from PicasaWeb or Flickr. In fact, in several respects, it falls completely short.

12) Applications are awesome. I admit, I’ve certainly been enjoying third party applications through Installer.app for quite a while now, but having the “official” go-ahead is nice. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most applications are free, including the ones I used most through Installer.app.

More to come as my iPhone 3G and me continue to get to know one another...

If you've had a chance to snuggle up with your iPhone 3G, let us know how it's going in the comments or forums.