C and I were in San Francisco, on Friday, coincident with the much anticipated launch of Apple’s iPhone. We saw the queue stretching up Stockton Street and into O’Farrell at midday, then in the evening we got back to the Apple Store at around 6:20pm having been longer exploring than we’d expected. We missed the launch by twenty minutes but, given the crowds, we probably wouldn’t have seen too much. We got there in time to see some of the first of the new iPhone owners emerging from the store.

We talked to one guy who’d caught our eye in the morning, He’d been waiting since 2pm on Thursday and was number three in the queue. What had attracted our attention was that he was the only one in the line-up wearing a suit. He had a tent with him. His office was nearby and he was able to carry on working with his laptop and mobile phone during the wait. Apparently the choice of attire had got him interviews with quite a few of the media. He was very happy to have his hands on a new iPhone.

A couple of hours after its launch, I was able to touch an iPhone for the first time at an AT&T store on Market Street and on Saturday morning I had a bit more time with Apple’s latest product at the Apple Store.

Although I wasn’t able to use the iPhone as a phone nor experience its EDGE data rates, I was left gagging for the day that it, or a descendant, will be available in New Zealand.

The iPhone is a thing of beauty that exudes quality; all shiny glass and metal. It feels superb in your hand. It has presence and enough weight to feel solid while not being heavy. It’s thinner than you imagine. The 160dpi display is beautiful and pin-sharp. The multi-touch UI is responsive, precise and intuitive. Typing on the virtual keyboard is at least as natural as, and more accurate than, using my Motorola SLVR’s keypad (though the SLVR, perhaps, isn’t the finest example of a keypad for touch-typists!)

I loaded up wasabicube in Safari and was amazed at how detailed the initial, non-zoomed, view of the site looked. The multi-touch display allowed me to select menu items despite their tiny size. Simple zooming – either by double-tapping or using the finger and thumb zoom gesture – allowed the columns of the site to be seen easily. Scrolling up and down, or left and right, by dragging a finger was very natural. With Wi-Fi the pages loaded with the same sort of pace I would expect them to load on my MacBook.

The little UI touches make the experience. The bounce that a scrolling page makes when you it the bottom, or the top, seems right. The ability to flick through photos or album art and have the physics agree with what you expect is truly captivating.

The iPhone was very hard to put down. The pre-launch hype was well deserved. The iPhone, in my opinion, delivers.

This is a groundbreaking product. Some say that it’s too expensive, others that is doesn’t do all that their Blackberry or Treo can manage. Others that the EDGE data performance is pitiful or the built-in battery is a hamstring. While all that may be true I think it’s the things it does do that are the deal maker. It does everything it was claimed to be able to do. In many ways it does them better than expected. The iPhone will appeal to a wide audience. It’s the future, now. It changes the way we think about interacting with devices. It makes the current crop of mobile phones, PDAs and music players look and feel dated.

For a first generation product it’s amazing. I can only imagine what the second generation iPhone will bring!

[On Saturday afternoon I saw my first iPhone user in the wild; a woman walking up Market using an iPhone as if she’d had it forever.]