My anticipation for a full day of iPhone 4

I'd love to give you my first impressions of the iPhone 4, but unfortunately only impression to date is how long my library is taking to synchronize. That's not new to the iPhone 4; I've been through this with previous Apple product releases. The difference today is how amazingly long it took to get my iPhone.

In the past, I've been able to scoot in and out of the mall, or have the unit delivered to my home. Today is the first time that I actually spent multiple hours in line. I ran out of battery on my 3GS. I ran out of books to read (real ones, not iBooks). On the other hand, Apple kindly catered with coffee, water, egg rolls, and pizza. "I'm so excited about today," one of the Apple employees told us. "Last night I could barely sleep."

Like that Apple staffer, I'm extremely eager to explore this new device, once my dratted sync finishes at last. On my short list of priorities:

• I can't wait to try out using a hardware keyboard with my iPhone (either USB, via the iPad camera kit, or Bluetooth)

• I am so looking forward to using the VGA connector to send iPhone data to a nearby monitor or TV

• I am breathless with anticipation of seeing the Retina display in action. So far "Sync in Progress" looks amazingly crisp, but you know what I'm saying here...

• I kind of want to test out the bad reception on kung fu grip we've all been hearing about. Right now I'm getting two bars at home, where normally I get full bars -- so I'm not all that sure that the 4 represents an improvement for me on coverage.

• At the suggestion of my colleagues, I'm eager to benchmark some of my favorite apps (and some of my own apps) to see how they perform versus the 3GS and the iPod touch.

• And, finally I can't wait to test iMovie for the iPhone 4 and FaceTime. These both sound like awesome fun -- and I hope they live up to the hype.

We'll all have more to say about the iPhone 4 over the next few days, but those are the things that I am most looking forward to spending time on.