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Despite being tired from getting up early and waiting in line for nearly 2 1/2 hours I’m so happy with my new phone. To put it simply – the iPhone is gorgeous. The retina display is something that really has to be seen to be believed. The phone feels very substantial in your hands (despite being smaller than the 3GS) and the build quality feels excellent.

The phone is super-fast. Webpages (over WiFi) seem to load almost instantly – certainly as quick as they do on my MacBook Pro. The camera is great, even in low-light conditions and I’ve been having fun with the HD video recorder. I’m hopeful that having a decent video recorder on me at all times will cause me to shoot more video (which I regret not doing more often).

Getting the phone itself was fairly painless. I queued outside the Vodafone store in Broadmead from a little before 06:00 and I was first in line. The manageress arrived at the store at about 07:00 and explained how the launch was going to work. She dished out tickets to those in line. Once you got a numbered ticket you could leave if you chose and your phone and place in the queue was guaranteed. She told me that they had 30 black 16GB and 9 black 32GB iPhones in stock. By the time the tickets were handed out, there were probably 15 or 20 people in the queue. I heard that there were as many as 100 people outside the Apple store in Cabot’s Circus and it looked to me that there were probably 50 people outside the O2 store!

I went for the 18 month contract at £40/month plus £10/month 1.5GB tethering package.

It’s been pretty painful all day not being able to play with the phone. The computers in the Vodafone store didn’t have iTunes 9.2 so they weren’t able to activate the phones they were selling and I had a busy day which meant I didn’t get a chance to do it myself until I got home a couple of hours ago.

The worst thing about today was that I actually dropped the phone on the floor once I got home! I lifted the box and it just fell out. My heart almost stopped. Fortunately everything seems to be fine and there are no scratches or dents. I guess that’s a testament to the build quality.

I’m really looking forwards to taking it to work tomorrow and showing it off.

Since this is a new gadget post, you’ll find below a couple of obligatory un-boxing photos