I have a confession: I'm a closet iPhone user. And I just waited in line six hours for a new one.

I've been using Windows Mobile devices for years -- all the way back to when they were called "Palm-Sized PC". They had better screen resolution and more power than my existing Palm Pilot, so the better technology won me over.

That same transition happend last year when I donned dark glasses and a hat and entered an Apple store for the very first time. Seven minutes later (they are efficient), I walked out with a new iPhone. I've never experienced the retail packaging nirvana that comes from opening an Apple product. It's just clean. I like that attention to detail. The iPhone turned out to be an amazing device. Although defficient in many features that my former Windows Mobile phone had, what it provided worked well, and most importantly, was a joy to use.

I have no self contol. I have a perfectly good Cingular 8525 phone that does everything I need. I've set it up just right so it has a very useful feature set for how I work.

But the iPhone is just so damn sexy.

I told myself: just one trip to the Apple store. If they had a phone in stock, I'd buy it. If not, I wouldn't sweat it and I wouldn't order it over the internet. They had one in stock. I bought it, and that's where the saga begins.

The phone really is a ground-breaking device. It's not the features. The iPhone will lose a feature war with most any recent generation Blackberry, Palm or Windows Mobile device. It's the way the features it does have are so seamlessly integrated. It's the way the touch screen responds to even the lightest stroke. It's the industrial design of the case and the exactness of the engineering that went into it.