Has anyone had a positive experience with the iPhone yet?

Just looking at my Twitter feed, it seems unlikely:

cubrilovic from the apple store: iphone "Estimated Ship: 2 - 4 weeks" doh!

steverubel So to recap today's events: 10 hours on line, $600 and an iBrick. Priceless.

davewiner text is impossibly small. no way anyone with mortal eyes can read it. what were they thinking! out of box experience SUCKS

Jim Dalrympleswitched his business account to a personal account specifically so he could get an iPhone. The real WTF here is why Apple would want to deny the people who are going to make the most calls, run up the biggest bills, and be the most reliable payers, from having their phones... but anyway, he now has a useless phone, because iTunes claims that his account type is not permitted to use an iPhone. Okay, so the other real WTF is that he has to use iTunes to configure his phone.. No, wait, it's the fact that he's spent lots of money to get the hardware, and now they're refusing to let him use it. Wow. Anyway, he's getting the runaround from AT&T, with every person he talks to giving him a different reason why he needs to talk to someone else.

Julie Gomoll paid $200 to get a spot at the front of the line, and now is waiting for AT&T to deal with the volume of authorisations expected.

Some random payperpost hack (I couldn't see a name) hasn't been able to get activated - but only discovered this after they'd upgraded both OS X and iTunes to the latest versions, a process that took about 40 minutes.

This commenter has even worse issues with activation, and this commenter is being forced to change their phone number. This commenter has had to break apart their family plan, lose accrued 'rollover' minutes - only to be later told that not only was that unnecessary, it also doesn't help, because they're on a business plan.

The post they're all commenting on is about the first reported DOA iPhone.

Wow.

Just to re-hash:

* You need to have an account with AT&T to get a phone

* Not just any account, but only personal accounts

* You can't do anything with it until it's activated

* You can't activate it until you use iTunes to register with Apple

* Even then, you may be waiting days to get it activated - assuming AT&T haven't screwed with your account completely.

* Even then, it only uses EDGE, not 3G

Over here, 'personal accounts' tend to have higher rates than 'business accounts'. I'm assuming that's true for AT&T as well - so any business user who switches their account to a personal account is going to be paying a higher bill for the same amount of talk, just for the privilege of having an iPhone. Sounds like a great deal!

Wow...

Okay, while writing this, I've seen three positive comments Steven is thrilled, Scoble and his son both seem happy, and Jason Calacaniscalls it "Stunning". So, apparently some people are happy.