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Unlike my old friend Peter who had a low-key purchasing experience in Winchester, I think I got my moneys worth after joining the line for about a hour outside the main Apple Store in the UK in London’s Regents Street.

Very soon after the scared hour of 6:02 pm the queue began to move.

After no more than 15 minutes the hundreds of people in front of me and worked they way into the shop and I followed them into the very busy store.. I was lead to one of about a dozen till points, all of which were operating with a least five staff, and handed over my credit card in return for two iPhones, if you see Lisa don’t mention that you know what her Christmas present is !!

So by about 6.20 pm I left with my iphones to the cheers of Apple Store staff who lined the exits, and to the bewilderment of most of the rest of the people on Regent Street.

Activation was very steightforward with no issues, even porting my number from Vodafone was easy, although according to a text I then got from O2 on my iphone the process will not be complete for another 10 days!, I have a temporary number to be going on with.

So over the weekend the iPhone has been my constant companion and I don’t really have much to add to what everybody else says.. from a user point of view it just works in the way you would want a phone/pda/ipod to do, and has all the little Apple touches that delight.

Of more interest I guess is the network experience, wifi just works selecting open networks and just using them, although you need to register your iphone at a cloud hotspot to make use of that service, a one off registration after which you phone just connects whenever in range of a cloud hotspot.

O2’s network is more of a disappointment, I’m actually reasonably happy with the performance of EDGE although slower than Vodafones UMTS network, it does not feel that slow.. however you are going to spend much of your time on good old GPRS as signified by that simple square icon, while o2 rolls out their EDGE network.

Over the weekend I only got that wonderful E icon while shopping in Kingston, maybe something to do with the fact there is an Apple Store there..

I can tell the hunt for “E’ is going to be the talking point for all UK iPhones owners for some time to come.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

So I have lost site of the end of line and its getting cold, this is not how it was in Palo Alto methinks.. still less than a hour to go and I would guess around 2000 people here..Just has a chat with a nice lady from trustedplaces.com, a happy Google maps api user.Written and submitted from the area around the Regents Street Apple Store using my Three 3G wireless modem.