Well, this started out as an iPhone blog, so I’d best write up a few bits & bobs on the iPhone 4.

I reserved an iPhone at the Cabot Circus Apple store, but since there were likely to be queues all day (even to pick up reserved ones) I got in the queue at around 6:15am, with 20 or so people ahead of me. After 45 minutes only one person had joined the “reserved” queue behind me. Ho hum. The queue of people who hadn’t got reservations grew steadily, though. The doors opened an hour early at 7am, and everyone got very excited.

Unfortunately the store had some technical difficulties registering iPhones, so the queue moved extremely slowly. I didn’t get in until nearly 9, and after various bits of faffing finally got out at 9:30am. By then the unreserved queue had grown to around 100 people, but the store thought they’d have enough stock and not disappoint anyone.

Last night I took a stanley knife to my SIM card, and cut a microSIM out of it (just cutting the exact lines needed, so the cut-out microSIM could actually pop back into the remaining plastic and be a proper SIM again, just in case it didn’t work). Borrowed a friend’s iPad SIM holder to make sure I’d got the shape just right, but it was still nervewracking putting the hacked around SIM into the new iPhone. Amazingly, it worked perfectly, so could start using the new iPhone straight away.

And “straight away” is the right phrase for it. Admittedly I’m upgrading from a 3G, not a 3GS, but the iPhone 4 is astoundingly, wonderfully fast. It’s slightly heavier than you expect, but the difference in weight from the 3G is pretty imperceptible.

The camera seems to have some kind of weird focus/zoom thing that I can’t quite figure out yet, but it’s dead easy to switch between rear and front cameras, and taking a picture is near instant. Very nice quality images too.

The retina display is pretty fantastic too. SMSes look good, all the text is much thinner and crisper, much easier on the eye (although it takes a little time to get used to). I think Pangea have updated all their apps to work well with the increased resolution, I’m sure most other games/apps will follow suit soon enough.

The only thing I don’t like about the new iPhone’s looks are the slight gaps in the metal casing around the edge: the gap at the top (by the headphone socket) in particular, when looking at the phone normally, keeps distracting my eye because I think there’s a scratch on the case. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, and the gaps do have a purpose (since the metal edge is in fact several antenna that have to be insulated from each other).

When I left Apple, of course all I had was a default iPhone. I got into the office, synced my old phone one last time, then plugged in the new one (after ticking “don’t let devices sync automatically” in iTunes prefs – always a wise precaution). iTunes recognised the new phone and asked me if I wanted to restore my old phone to it. Clicking “yes”, I had everything almost exactly as it was on the 3G within about 20 minutes, apart from email and wifi passwords (slightly annoying that, can see I’m going to have to update a load of users’ iPhones with their email passwords when they upgrade).

Anyway, all in all, I’m very happy with the iPhone. Three have just released their SIM-only pricing, £15/month for 300 mins, 2k txts and 1GB data.Will be cancelling Orange and going to Three this month.