So I didn't wait in line. I wandered into the AT&T store in Pittsford late Saturday afternoon merely intending to order one. But I got two surprises. One, they still had iPhones in stock. Not the coveted 8-gigabyte model, but the 4-gigabyte model, which would do for my purposes. Two, the AT&T store would not sell it to my lab at RIT, just to me as an individual. The issue, in my case at least, centered around the use of RIT's not-for-profit tax exemption. But if you're planning to buy one for your business, not for yourself, double-check with the AT&T or Apple store by phone before you go. At any rate, I arrived home last Saturday afternoon an iPhone owner.

What grade does the professor give the iPhone? An "A-," which is pretty good for a bleeding-edge new device. And here's the report card:

Cost. There's been some whining about this, especially about the cost of the monthly subscription fee, but it isn't significantly worse than whatever a high-end smart phone costs for hardware or service.

Registering the phone through iTunes. While issues have been reported around the country, I had no significant ones. It took somewhere around 30 minutes for AT&T to swap my account from the BlackJack to the iPod. Not a big deal. I know of one person who had trouble registering it on a university business account, but that's the only local problem I'm aware of so far.

Network speeds. AT&T's Edge network? Not ideal, but not so horrendous as to make the device unusable. So it takes a minute or two to download the satellite maps or web pages when I'm on the road. A WiFi connection, on the other hand, is quite zippy. In an informal test during a meeting where a colleague and I were searching web pages head to head (she on a PC laptop and I on my iPhone), I kept up to speed without breaking a sweat, even when downloading and reading a pdf file. The network access will be upgraded in the next hardware revision, I'm sure.

Limited storage. Not the end of the world. Take the worst-case example of the 4-gig model. First, it's really a 3.5 gig model once you consider the 500mb used by the OS. So with the space left I currently have:

• 75 songs, taking up 272 megabytes and providing 4.7 hours of music.

• 71 podcasts with a mix of music, spoken word, and video for 1.7 days of listening and viewing time.

• 6 family photos.

And I still have half a gig of storage space on the device.

If I wanted to, I could flush it all out of the phone and fit two or three Hollywood movies on it with some room to spare. If iTunes starts selling movies at small-screen size for iPods only, I could store more, but they currently only vend full gigabyte-size movies for full-screen computer viewing.

Clearly, 8 gigs would store more, and having flash-card storage would help as well, but it's not as if I'm deprived of digital entertainment on my iPhone. I just have to consciously manage it better than I do my 80-gig video iPod, which I never manage at all.

Browsing the web. Never before would I have said surfing the web on a hand-held was fun or functional. Doing so on the iPhone is both. Doing so on a laptop is easier, for sure, but I had very few problems on the iPhone, even when performing complex maneuvers like completing an e-commerce transaction on-line, credit card entry and all.

Map application. Excellent implementation of Google maps on a handheld. If they manage to squeeze GPS hardware into the next one, or even put GPS software on the device so you can connect to a Bluetooth GPS adaptor, this will be awesome.

Notes application. It should let you tilt for wide-screen mode for the larger keyboard, but it doesn't. In fact, any application in which you enter text would be enhanced by allowing wide-screen, bigger keyboard mode. Currently, many of them don't.

E-mail. POP mail only (which means the mail downloads to the handheld) is a disappointment. IMAP mail, where your mail stays on the server, might be better. It would help to have another option in its gmail implementation that gave you a choice to download mail attachments or not. This is another likely software upgrade at some point.

Phone. Oh, yeah; it's a phone. I'm smiling and dialing away. While I've heard that some users have complaints about the volume being too low, I don't. It paired with my Bluetooth headset smoothly as well. So far, only one dropped call. And that one was in a zone where other phones and other carriers have also dropped calls. I would like to be able to search my address book as well as scroll the list, but this is another simple software fix down the road.

Camera: At two megapixels, it has a slightly higher resolution than my BlackJack, but is much less functional. The iPhone camera offers basically snap and store without many of the camera-phone bells and whistles. This could also might be improved with software or might require a hardware upgrade in 2.0 as well.

Battery life. Hard to tell. Since it's a new toy that all my friends and even complete strangers want to see, I'm using it much more than I would in a normal day, and it lasts from 9-5 with about a third of its life to spare.

Bottom line, if you're a full-on Blackberry-Treo-Windows device road warrior and you want to be able to run your business from your phone, the iPhone likely isn't for you. If you must carry your entire audio and video collection with you or want a camera phone as good as dad's old 35mm SLR was, the iPod isn't for you either. However, if you want a true convergence device with strong all-around functionality and incredible ease of use, today's iPhone could be a worthwhile investment for you now. If you want to wait til version 2.0, you might be picking up a device I'll give an "A" or "A+" to.