iPhone 4s Day 0: Unboxing, Setup & No Service Yet

I'll start off by saying that yesterday started out wonderfully. I checked UPS tracking and the box was in Doraville, which is UPS' main hub in my area, and was out for delivery before I left home. I got my son to preschool on time, which never happens. I go to Starbucks and it's Starbucks' birthday, so I get to sample coffee and eat cake. Traffic is light. Wings Friday (the one day a week I go to lunch here with coworkers instead of working out, and pig out on buffalo wings) was good as usual. Then around 3 PM things started to sour. The consultant I was working with had an issue arise on an account much bigger than ours, so he had to work it. That took almost 3 hours. The package was delivered to the house around 5:30, but I didn't get home until 7:30. Then I spent some time with the boys before putting them to bed. My wife wanted a calzone for dinner so I went out about 9:15 to get that. En route to the pizza place, I get a call from work. When I get back home, I spend the next about 3 hours working an issue. But in the middle of the work issue, I couldn't take the pressure anymore and started the unveiling.

So we start out with a slightly beat up box:

Then we get to the prize, whose box was much smaller than the outer box made it out to be.

The box is opened! The Palm Pre box was packaged similarly. Must be a Cali thing. I went with the black 32 GB. After the browning of the last set of white iPhones, I didn't want to take a chance on them even though I'm sure they've worked that out.

The iPhone next to the soon-to-be-retired Palm Pre. Please pardon the chandelier lights. The Palm is a lot thicker, but a lot shorter. The length of the iPhone bothers me, but apparently the mantra is "you'll get used to it."

The rest of packaging. Note to self: Buy 3 extra wall chargers and a car charger.

All this unpackaging was making me thirsty so...

And it being turned on for the first time. And yes, the crappy screen protection that comes on the phone is staying on there until my real screen protectors and case come, which is hopefully early next week.

So I go through the initial setup, which is pretty simple and painless. It lets me do everything through wifi, which was good since I was still working the work issue and needed a cell phone. This thing is pretty damn fast, but in reality, I haven't done anything yet. My Pre, even when overclocked, still had moments of stuttering and slow rendering. I set up my emails and contacts, which brought me to my first "issue" which was all my contacts being in Google. I couldn't figure out why I would set up my Gmail account and it would not give me an option to sync contacts. A quick Google search showed that I had to set my Gmail account as a Microsoft Exchange account in order to get my contacts to sync. That honestly seems like Apple saying "eff you" to Google, but whatever, it works. My Pre wins this battle with its Synergy syncing of all my contact info.

So I'm finally done with work, so I get on Sprint to activate the phone, which is also simple. However, it takes an hour to finally activate. So now it is almost 2 AM, but I have a fully activated and functional iPhone 4s on Sprint. So I'm going to go to bed, and probably mess around some more which probably puts my actual bed time at more like 3 AM. So I'll leave this Day 1 post with this one last issue, which is:

THE VIRTUAL KEYBOARD SUCKS GINORMOUS DONKEY BALLS!!!

"You'll get used to it..."