I finally got my iPhone up and running after a trip to the AT&T store (I was having quite a few problems with the iTunes activation). I still was not able to transfer my old Verizon number over – and no one at AT&T, Verizon, or Apple seemed sure why – so I had to set it up with a new number for now and hopefully switch to my old number in a few days. (UPDATE: AppleInsider has a great post on what the problem – in my case – was, and the “fix” – read: hack – to get around it. It’s kind of silly that neither Apple or AT&T realized this would be a problem)

As I said briefly yesterday, using the iPhone is simply awesome. Yes, the following may sound like fanboy speak, but I think I’ve used every feature now fairly extensively for the past few hours and let some of my initial excitement die down. So here are some 2nd-day thoughts on the iPhone:

a) Steve Jobs was not exaggerating, the iPhone is the best iPod Apple has ever made. You can be certain that the new Coverflow-central UI will be making it to all iPods with screens eventually, it’s just a better and more intuitive way to organize and sort music.

b) In areas where EDGE coverage is kind of hit-or-miss (such as the place I’m currently in), many of the iPhone features are obviously going to be extremely crippled by long loading times and frequent load errors. Everything eventually works, but goes very slow. That said, for things like YouTube videos, iPhone seems to do a very nice job caching the movies so playback is still smooth.

c) The 2 megapixel camera on the iPhone is very nice, especially when compared to my old crappy 1.2 megapixel on on the RAZR.

d) A few times now I’ve simply forgot that the iPhone is actually a phone too. That’s a good thing in my book.

e) All the features and apps seem to be very responsive. No more 5 second wait times to load up the text-message app (if you can even call it an app) that I had on the RAZR with Verizon’s crappy UI.

f) For all the early fears about typing on the iPhone, I’d say its about 1000 times easier than typing on almost every other phone. I can type actual sentence still just using one finger in almost the amount of time it used to take me to type a long word on the RAZR. I fully expect to get better at typing as I use it more as well. I had a few mis-hits, but the software does a great job with auto-correcting too.

g) Having Safari load full web pages instead of the old text-based crap is simply great beyond words. Likewise using the multi-touch gestures to control zoom on both pages and pictures is great.

h) Yes, the screen gets smudges from your fingers, but you cannot see them when the screen is on. The screen is very clear and very bright.

i) Battery life seems excellent. I’ve been using the things for hours now loading and unloading everything, the battery is still around 75%.

j) Talk quality is about the same as any other cell phone I’ve ever had.

So a day-and-a-half into the iPhone era, I can say that I am defintely still a huge fan. If Apple can make the phone slightly more affordable for people it will absolutely, without-a-doubt revolutionize the cellular industry – especially when America gets some faster and more reliable high-speed cellular services like Europe and Asia (which are rumored to be getting a 3G iPhone at launch).

Here are a few more first reviews/impressions: TUAW | Scobleizer | Scripting News | Computerworld