On June 29, 2007 at Freehold Raceway Mall in Freehold, New Jersey, I bought the first model of the iPhone that was made available for public sale. We still have that iPhone here today. My son Peter sometimes plays games on it.
I remember saying to my wife Kathleen, “Well, I’m going to go to the Apple Store and if it looks amazing, I may buy one.” I ended up paying $599 plus tax for the 8 Gigabyte model.
My first article about the iPhone was actually about the problems I had activating it, I Got My iPhone Yesterday, Maybe It Will Work Today. This article documents the process of:
- traveling around, trying to find a store that had sufficient stock to meet the initial demand, the lesson learned that day is never go to a carrier’s store on launch day if there’s an Apple Store within driving distance,
- going to Best Buy and purchase a Windows XP upgrade because I had been using Windows 2000 Professional, and the iPhone was not compatible with Windows 2000 for syncing purposes,
- upgrading a homemade PC to run Windows XP, watch out for SATA disk controllers that are not natively supported by Windows XP,
- activating the iPhone, a process that took until 9:26pm on Saturday, due to the scalability issues that AT&T with their custom activation process for the iPhone.
First Photos from the Original iPhone
I created a photo set on Flickr called First Photos from My iPhone where I posted 18 of my first 100 photos taken.
This photo of Lower Manhattan at Sunset (shown above) is still one of my favorites.
What’s most interesting about these photos, in my opinion, is that they were all scaled down to 640 x 480 in order to conform to the Flickr email posting interface at the time. (Remember there were no third party apps on the iPhone, no easy way to upload photos back then either AFAIK.)
I have to look and see if I have the original photos and compare them to the scaled-down versions of the photos that are currently shown on Flickr.