I'm so ashamed.

On Saturday we were going to get some costume stuff from the Mardi Gras store (yes, they have Mardi Gras stored in Mobile, full of masks and beads and hats and feathery things), and we stopped at the AT&T store to see if maybe they had a display model of a new phone. Yes, that new phone. They had three display models for demonstrations, and between it working precisely as advertised and the streaming video from YouTube I was sold.

Or rather, it was sold. To me.

Being away from my computer, I didn't try to activate the thing until Sunday afternoon, and because I'm already a Cingular/AT&T customer, I had the lovely activation-delay experience that you might have read about. I was finally able to get past the "Please plug me into your computer to activate" screen at about 11pm last night.

Some initial impressions:
Good

• Everything that you might have seen the phone do in a commercial or a keynote, it does. If there's a phone number in an email, you can touch it to call that number. The Google Maps feature and mini-Safari work exceptionally well (as long as you're on Wifi somewhere).
• Speaking of Wifi, it automatically hunts down networks for you and asks you which one you want to connect to--there's a lock icon for protected networks, but compared to trying to logon to a new network via PSP (which took something like ten steps), it works exceptionally well.
• While the EDGE network (for when there's no Wifi) is slow, it was slower on my old phone, which had a text-based browser. The old phone plan also charged for bandwidth after a ridiculously small amount, and couldn't display a picture larger than a thumbnail icon, which is covered with this thing.
• Ninety percent of the functions are completely intuitive.
• It looks like you can sync up with any POP webmail account. GMail works great, although I've not been able to store a picture sent in an email to the phone, yet.

Not-so-good

• There appears to be no way to set up phone lists for mass-texting. This means future haiku and observations will be less frequent and/or more personal.
• YouTube seems to have a somewhat limited selection, compared to the actual site--I've not been able to find videos that I know exist (Lore's State Quarters rating, for instance).
• There appears to be no way to sync up the calendar or address book with web-based apps. I keep my addresses (and phone numbers) in GMail, and my calender on Google Calendar as these things are less likely to crash and require reformatting than, say, Outlook. You can only transfer your addresses and calendar from Outlook, as far as I can tell. For some reason, you can only transfer your bookmarks from IE (or, presumably, Safari, if I were to download and install it), which doesn't help those of us on Firefox.

Overall, however, I'm pleased. I've transferred everyone's phone number over--if you've got my phone number, and want to make sure I've got yours right, you can shoot me a text message (with your name, duh) or give me a call so I can verify that I haven't screwed up anything typing on the tiny tiny screen (which works pretty well, even though I can't get O's and P's to come out precisely).

If you've got questions, or want to call me a consumer whore (and how!), you know where the comments link is.