the switch from Curve to iPhone 3g

I broke the trackball retaining ring on my Blackberry Curve (8300) right before my flight SNA-DFW on Sunday. Serves me right for tinkering with cleaning the trackball without knowing its fragility and never reading instructions manuals or user’s guide. I got sand into that trackball on the day before. The Curve is next to impossible to use without the trackball. Also very hard to use sealed inside of a zip-lock bag. The past 2 days, I used the Curve with the trackball precociously set without a retainer, fearing it’d get lost in the crevices of my pocket. It was gonna be $54.13 for the trackball to be professionally replaced in 30 minutes or less. Thought it better to use that $ towards the iPhone.

Long story short, I got an iPhone 3g yesterday afternoon! Of course it is beautiful, and the switch took less than 5 minutes, after 15+ minutes waiting for a customer service rep at the closest AT&T store, I could find near the meeting space where I was part of facilitating team for Missional Renaissance discussions.

Got a whole slew of twitter congrats as it happened real-time. There was evening, and there was day. While impressive, I’ve already got gobs of questions about iPhone functionality, along the lines of “can it do this” or “how about that” or “that’s so annoying”. Could I type faster on the iPhone via a bluetooth keyboard? I don’t think the built-in virtual keyboard is a disaster, but the auto-word replacement is annoying. Wish to turn that off, like you can turn off the auto-capitalization. Why won’t iTunes sync it with my Outlook address book? ad nauseum et al et tu brute

Unlike other fanatics of that Apple variety, I pledge before you my loyal blog readers, that will not be gloating about all the features and shortcomings of the iPhone. There will not be a blog iPhone category here. Besides, I’m more of an orange guy myself.

Now, onto the quest for an orange cover / case. [update 8/28] got an orange cover (incase protective cover) at Apple store South Coast Plaza

[Longer version of the “switch” may be posted here, as time avails.]