iPhone Update: The World's Smart People Are Buying Them TODAY

Kevin Maney writes: I'm sorry, but anybody who waited five hours to buy an iPhone 3G on Friday or Saturday has all the intellectual prowess of, say, Patrick on SpongeBob SquarePants. The really smart people -- or maybe the ones with a life -- are going to the Apple Store today, or even tomorrow.

The lines were abominable, thanks not just to demand for the phones -- but to Apple's servers crashing, which meant it took way more time for store employees to activate each phone. Buyers lined up, apparently, out of fear that if they didn't buy a new iPhone NOW, stores would run out and not have them for quite some time. That fear, based on shortages of the original iPhone, seems unfounded. A couple of stores I checked with on Sunday said that they hadn't run out, and if they did, they'd have more on Monday or Tuesday at the latest.

(I'm a little confused by Apple's iPhone "check availability" page on its Web site. This morning, either there's no list up, or it's not working, or the way it's supposed to work is not obvious to me.)

That said, I had an iPhone 3G to test over the weekend, thanks to AT&T. I didn't seem to run into any glitches connecting with iTunes or the Web or anything else. I agree with most of the reviewers' comments that the phone is great but still has some faults. Like, having a prominant YouTube button but no capability to shoot video feels like going to seaside resort where you can't go into the water.

And I still can't accurately type on that damn on-screen keyboard, which made it frustratingly difficult to type an address into Google Maps while idling at a stoplight.

Bottom line: Cool phone, but I can think of about 10,000 things I'd rather do than wait for one in a five-hour line.