Personally, I am not doing the whole wait in line thing this year. Instead I am going to make an attempt at a leisurely entrance sometime in the early morning hours. That said, I am not all that worried if I miss out today, I want the 3G S, but can also wait a few weeks if I had to.

Anyway, for those heading out this morning, you should hopefully already be at the destination of your choice because the doors at both Apple and AT&T were opening up at 7am this morning.

As for AT&T, the 7am opening time is just for those that pre-ordered the iPhone 3G S. For those that did not place a pre-order (like myself) and are hoping to still grab an iPhone today (like myself), then your time is 8am.

As for Apple, you may want to check your individual store on Apple.com, however it looks like most stores (and I am using the word most a little lightly) are set to open at 7am.

Additionally, AT&T has offered up a nice complete guide, which you can find over on ATT.com

Move & Delete items:

- Go into your favorites/mail messages/other items screen.

- Click the ‘Edit’ button in the left or right corners.

- Delete an item by clicking the red icon beside the name and then confirm the deletion.

- To move a Bookmark/Favorite (only), click the icon to the right of the name, then slide the name to the position you wish.

- An alternate method to deleting, is to slide your finger from left to right over the item, which reveals the delete button.

Mail your Safari URL’s to someone:

Goto the page you want to mail in Safari. Then tap the address bar which will reveal the keyboard. Click the Share button at the top left corner and a new ‘compose email’ shall open with the URL included as the message of the email, as well as the subject line. Add the email address & anything else, then click send.

Automatic Mail Checking:

- Tap the Settings icon on the home screen , then the Mail selection.

- Scroll down, and tap the Auto-Check option.

- Select the how frequent you want your mail updated

Modify Ipod Menu Buttons:

- In the main menu, Select the iPod icon from the bottom right corner.

- Select the ‘More’ icon in the bottom right corner.

- Then click the ‘Edit’ icon.

- Drag the icon you desire down into the menu over the icon you want replaced.

Do a Hard Reset:

- Press and hold the ’sleep/wake’ button on top of the iPhone, and the ‘Home’ button on the bottom front for a several seconds.

- When you see the Apple logo, let go.

- The iPhone will reboot and all will be well.

Quit a Frozen Application:

If an application seems frozen for a long time, you can attempt to close it by pressing and holding the Home button for several seconds until it releases.

Enable Caps-Lock Feature:

- Enable Caps-Lock by touching the ‘Settings’ icon in the home screen, then the ‘General’ button on the following screen.

- Touch the ‘Keyboard’ button.

- In the keyboard settings screen, tap on the switch next to ‘Enable Caps Lock’.

To use the feature, quickly double tap the shift key and it will turn blue. Now you are in caps lock mode. When you’re done, tap the shift key again to exit caps lock mode.

Power Down, Power Up:

- Press and hold the sleep/wake, on/off button on the top of the iPhone for several seconds.

- The screen will change and the top will display a button ‘Slide to power off’. Slide the power off button from left to right,

- To turn your phone back on, press the same on/off button on the top of the phone for a few seconds, and it will start up again.

AT&T is offering its remaining stock of 16GB iPhone 3G units for $149 with a two-year agreement, according to the Boy Genius Report, a popular Apple/tech blog.

iPhone 3G

Citing an AT&T insider, the report speculates that since Apple is only offering the 8GB model via its website, 16GB units may be available on a “while supplies last” basis. Apple didn’t mention the 16GB model during today’s
Keynote Address, suggesting that these discounted units are not part of its long-term strategy for the iPhone.

Basically, they’re clearing out stock, a fairly typical corporate strategy given its view that this is “old” technology at this point.

Many expect the existing stock of old model iPhones to be gone within a month or two, with the hype of the new phone and the sell-through prices.

For the past few days, people have talking about the 3G iPhone and its awesome feature. And along with that discussion, it will lead to a debate if there is anything that would beat Apple Inc.’s iPhone or at least challenge it. The readers as well as other mobile phone users have a lot to say regarding this topic. Read on to know what other devices they think will challenge the second-generation iPhone from Apple Inc.

First on the list is the BlackBerry from Research in Motion. Although others would say that it is the 3G iPhone that is trying to catch up and trying to beat the BlackBerry.

The second device that readers can think of is the Windows Mobile 7. This is a smartphone that has the same feature like that of the 3G iPhone. But others disagree. They said that the Windows Mobile 7 is no match for the second-generation iPhone. Probably if the Windows Mobile 8 is already out, then the 3G iPhone will have a serious challenger. The Windows Mobile 8 is expected to be launched in 2010.

Other device includes Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Curve, Samsung i900, HTC Diamond, Sony Xperia, and HTC Touch Pro. The latter two devices are expected to come out within this year.

Wholesaler China Ontrade.com has posted parts from the next-generation iPhone 3G 2009: The LCD screen and the middle internal bezel.

They even have pictures comparing the new parts to the old ones, and it looks pretty legit.

The wholesaler says the following in their site:

“This is great honor for China Ontrade (HK) chinaontrade.com to be the 1st started to supply iphone 3gen 2009 parts directly from factory.”

It looks like the web site and the new parts are the real deal, but who knows. They also sell every single spare iPhone 3G part you can imagine—as well as original factory parts for Blackberry, Nokia, LG, HTC, MacBooks, and even Nintendo. They claim the new iPhone 3G 2009 parts will ship “within 5 to 12 working days.”

As expected, there is no OLED screen seen here. Unless they have another product using the OLED, which isn’t likely at this stage. The omission of an OLED screen is liable to cause much angst among technophiles, who were clamoring for an OLED screen to be included in this version of the iPhone.

Anyone who’s played classic Sega and Nintendo games are very familiar with the wacky hedgehog, Sonic.

It’s been a console game institution for years now, and its headed to your iPhone.

Sonic The Hedgehog for iPhone was released today on the App Store, and you can download Sonic for the iPhone for $5.99 and start racing through various levels to free captured animals from the insidious Dr. Eggman.

Sonic for iPhone was announced by Sega’s Director of Production, Paxton Lazar, during the “Mobile Gaming Experience” panel at the Consumer Electronics Show, on January 7, 2009 and finally released today.

According to Sega, Sonic has been faithfully recreated to take advantage of the iPhone’s powerful capabilities, enabling users to enjoy the classic style and breakneck speed of the game with responsive touchpad controls and sharp, clear graphics that will take players back to the old console stomping grounds.

You can choose between fullscreen or “Arcade” view, and supposedly the animation and scrolling is very smooth.

Blog Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that a dedicated Hulu application is indeed on its way. An iPhone app should be here in just a few months.

Hulu has been busy denying the rumors that an iPhone version of Hulu was coming. SAI says the application will work over Wi-Fi and AT&T’s 3G network, meaning that users will be able to view programming anywhere with a fast data connection. The upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 software update, which lets developers bake streaming media into their applications.

For Hulu, this means that the advertising could be stuck into the mobile stream and that users would be able to watch videos without leaving the application.

Users of Hulu can watch ad-supported, full-length television shows and movies on their personal computers for free, instead of paying Apple to download a copy for offline viewing. If such an app were available on the iPhone, it would also offer portable TV and movie watching, something not yet offered in Apple’s own mobile iTunes app, which is limited to video podcasts.

Here’s an oddity: Arabic and Hebrew characters don’t render in the iPhone’s web browser. BBC News, for example, offers news in a variety of different languages, including Arabic. However, when you try to view those pages on the iPhone, the Arabic text renders as gibberish. A quick test of other sites in both Arabic and Hebrew showed that the iPhone’s version of Safari doesn’t render either language correctly. Safari on OS X (and, presumably, on Windows) handles Arabic and Hebrew just fine, and in fact languages with other alphabets do seem to display correctly on the iPhone’s version of Safari: Chinese and Russian, for example. The problem likely lies in the character encodings supported by the iPhone’s browser: indeed, visiting one site which tests Unicode support for browsers showed that Safari on the iPhone does not recognize any characters from Hebrew or Arabic, though it does recognize most characters from other encodings such as Cyrillic and Japanese. I presume support for other alphabets will materialize in a future software update, and I’d imagine it’d be necessary before the iPhone can be offered for sale in the Middle East, anyway.

Have you just bought a new iPhone and are having a hard time getting the voice mail set up? You may have spent hours on the phone with customer service and gotten nowhere. Here, you will find the help you need to get your voice mail set up easily.

The first thing is not to put the SIM card from your old phone into your iPhone. Everything else will work but you voice mail and visual mail will likely not work. If you go to an AT&T store, you can get a new SIM put in your phone and help with getting everything from your old SIM card transferred to it.

Now you are ready for the next step. Call customer service at AT&T (the exclusive iPhone service provider in the US) and tell the representative that you need to setup voice mail. Be sure to tell him or her to check to make sure the forwarding feature to forward calls to your voice mail is turned on. This is something that is often overlooked by customer service representatives. Once this is done, you are ready to actually setup voice mail.

Before you begin, it is a good idea to know what password you want to use. Might write down what you want to record as your outgoing message, too. Doing this will save time and make the process to setup voice mail go smoother.

Your password should be between 6 and 15 characters. Make sure it is something you can remember but others will find impossible to guess. Now you tap the voice mail icon on your iPhone. You will be asked to create a password at this point. Enter the password you have created and then you will be asked to record a greeting. You will have the option of using a default iPhone voice mail greeting that will include your phone number or you can record your own. You can change your greeting at any time by tapping voice mail, greeting, custom and then record. Do not forget to save your greeting once you are satisfied with it.

Students at Penn state who subscribe to Penn iPhone can log in to My iPhone and setup voice mail for their iPhones. PennKey authentication will be required. Once on the home page, look for Features and Voice Mail and go to that page. Here, you will put in the password you have created. You can change this password at any time by logging in on My iPhone or through the voice mail icon on your phone. After you have entered your password, re-enter it is the field, Confirm Password. After up press the submit button, your account will be updated to include it.

To record your greeting, press the ‘messages’ button, it will be to the right of the keypad. Press ‘0′ to bring up the mailbox options. From there, you will be prompted to choose the type of greeting you want, such as busy, unavailable and name. Then you will get a prompt from the system to record your greeting. When you are finished, choose accept, listen and, if you desire, re-record. When you are satisfied with your greeting, press * or # to go back to the menu or exit.