Last night I got to the Los Gatos apple store at 10:45PM to get in line, and luckily my father and I were the 11th and 12th people in line.  After a long night, we were greeting in the morning by lines of cheering and hi-fiving apple store employees.  I really love the apple store product launch environment.  The staff is very friendly and welcoming, even though it eerily continues the impression of Apple being some sort of Kool-Aid sipping cult.

Well at 7:00AM they opened the doors and at 7:12 AM I walked out with my shiny new iPhone 4.  Restoring and activating took less than 5 minutes at home, and when I first picked up the device all I could think was “wow”. When you pick up the device, a combination of three things jump out at you that sets it apart from the 3Gs, 3G and 2.5G iPhones.  The first and most obvious is the feel of the phone in your hand.  It feels like a solid machine, it’s small but dense, as if Apple packed as much firepower into the slim 9.3mm device.  The second thing I noticed was the display.  I thought the Retina Display was a gimmick, of course a gimmick I was highly looking forward to but wow!  The last and most enjoyable thing that jumps out at you is the speed. Oh yes, the speed.

The iPhone 4 is fast.  Think back to a time when you may have upgraded your computer from a Pentium Celeron processor to a shiny new Core 2 Duo or perhaps Core i7 processor.  It’s an immediately noticeable speed improvement.  My previous phone, the iPhone 3G sported a 412MHz processor paired with 128MB of RAM.  The iPhone 4 jumps to a 1GHz Apple A4 chip paired with 512MB of RAM.  Four times the memory, two and a half times the processing power, the phone is a beast.  Applications that used to take 10-20 seconds to launch now launch in milliseconds.  I’m in heaven.

In an upcoming review I’ll post examples of the video and photos, as well as some FaceTime photos.  In the mean time, I look forward to the next two years with this phone.