Awww Yeah!

The iPhone has arrived in Alaska. And in my pocket.

Last Friday the Apple blogosphere noted a press release from AT&T indicating they were beginning their full takeover of Cellular One locations nationwide, a takeover that included bringing the iPhone to more regions in the country, including Alaska. The press release noted the iPhone would launch in Alaska on Sunday, December 9.

It did. And I was there.

I stood outside in the (thankfully somewhat warm) Alaskan winter for 1.5 hours to make sure I got one of only 200 devices being released to the store closest to me. I was about 12th in line with perhaps another 40 people behind me when I got into the store.

Activation was painless. Getting the phone number to work for local callers was not painless. I had to call AT&T tech support to request they update their call routing records so my number could receive calls from Anchorage. By early evening on Monday all was resolved.

Time for a jailbreak?

Will I jailbreak this phone? No way. I didn’t drop $400 on this rather stunning device in order to brick it with some hacky workaround. Sure, thousands have done it and sing the praises of an unlocked iPhone (I admit it, I’m tempted at least a little). But I’ll stick with the stock setup and see what comes out early next year as Apple opens up the applications floodgates (in theory).

But you just got an iPod Touch!

The iPod Touch — still a worthy device — now migrates to Stephanie’s hands. Now that I have the iPhone I’m kinda pissed that Apple has left off so many worthy applications from the Touch. Most notably the Mail and Google Maps applications should have made the jump (and still could). The widgets are also cool (weather, stocks) but can be replicated elsewhere. Thankfully Google has mobile-optimized most of their core services, like Gmail and Google Reader.