They started lining up last night at 8pm. I got to the Apple store at 3:30am and I’m #60 (update now I’m #100 people because were saving spots). Now there are hundreds behind me but employees informed us they have a large stock of iPhones.
Update: There are at least 300 in the reserve line with more pouring in, lucky bastards.
Update: Screw the Reston Apple Store. They are only letting in reserves and spending 10 minutes with each person trying to upsell MobileMe, one employee per person. That’s ridiculous, at Fair Oaks last year they processed reserves and normies at the same time, I got in line at 6am and had my phone at 8:15am. Today I just wasted six hours at the Apple store because they processed 50 reserves per one standby customer. Employees came by periodically with snacks and lied to us about getting in the store while no one was let in the store. We are customers to, only a few were able to pre-order or reserve iPhones because Apple’s website was crushed by unanticipated demand.
The Reston Apple store completely failed to provide iPhone 4’s to customers, I can’t imagine a worse failure. This article sums it up.
Just drove to Best Buy, all units reserved. Called Radio Shack, they have a few extra units, check out the line:
I’m #3 in line, not bad for arriving 20 minutes before opening which was 10am. The Radio Shack manager who looked like he was 17 said that per Apple’s instructions they can’t hold phones, they must sell them. He announced at noon he would give away people’s reserves if they didn’t show and I scored a fancy new iPhone. Glory.
Here is another Google Earth animation created from GPS data recorded with my iPhone. This time I recorded a 21.5 mile track as I drove on the highway up to Wintergreen. There are 1792 data points in this track, so the animation is smooth. The colorization represents an ascent from 500 to 3200 feet.
I use the GPS capabilities iPhone a lot, navigating, finding restuarants, but the coolest feature is it’s ability to record GPS tracks. There are 2 apps I use for this, Path Tracker and GPS Tracker. Both of these apps allow you to export the saved data to Google Maps and Google Earth (.kml files). Then you can use Google Earth to make a badass video of the 3D terrain:
Path Tracker is $.99 on the app store and is worth it if you want to record and save your tracks of biking, hiking or whatever. It is very easy to use, just click start path, and when you are done you hit save, and your track is immediatly available on pathtracks.com. The better satellite coverage you have, the more data points your path will have.
Each data point on the path contains handy info like lat/lon, timestamp, and current speed.
It also automatically generates nice speed and elevation graphs.
Path tracker doesn’t require a your phone to have data connection, you can record your track and then save it when you return to coverage. GPS tracker however does require a data connection, because it tracks your movement in real time on Google Maps. You can send your family a link and have them track your progress in real time, you can also save your tracks and export them to Google Maps/Earth like Path Tracker, but it’s not as easy. Path Tracker is specifically designed for recording and sharing paths, GPS tracker is a more general utility, best used when you want a 3rd party to be able to track you in real time over the internet.
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