KEY POINTS:
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" phrase, used to describe the 1990s US sharemarket, would have done nicely a fortnight ago to explain the lengths people went to to lay their hands on Apple's iPhone.
There was the one who camped outside Vodafone's Queen St store
for 55 hours, determined to be first in line when the phone went on sale at 12.01am on July 11. It turned out he was put up to it by a PR company.
Three places behind him in line was a team from iFixit, a California company that sells parts for iPods and other Apple products. Their mission was to be first in the world to buy an iPhone 3G and pull it to bits, giving an online account of the autopsy.
Then there were the hundreds of others who queued down the street and around the corner on one of the coldest nights of the winter. Whether they were worried about missing out, or just wanted to be part of the occasion, I don't know.
I thought I'd be cleverer than that and join the virtual queue on Vodafone's website. But that turned out to be a doomed strategy.
For a start, the site practically ground to a halt under the traffic. After an hour or so of trying, I realised I couldn't transfer an existing on-account number to a phone bought online - presumably because the paperwork was more complicated than the site could cope with.
I went to bed thankful that my exuberance had been thwarted and I wasn't unaccountably the owner of a phone I'd vowed 12 months before to have nothing to do with.
Seven or eight hours and several Weetbix later, the exuberance was surging again, and a phone call established that StudentIT in Symonds St had a couple of the 16GB black model that I liked the look of.
Alas, by the time I got there they were gone and white was all that was left.
Told that it was impossible to take one out of its box to see if I could learn to love a white one, the exuberance deserted once more and I returned home again thankful to have held on to my money.
That might have been the end of it except media blogger and Apple appreciator Russell Brown wrote later that morning of having found himself a phone of the same specifications my heart had been set on at Westfield St Lukes.
It was back into the car and down to the mall.
There, my hand was forced. A 16GB black phone had been put aside for another customer who failed to collect it. I had no choice but to buy it.
A fortnight on, me and my iPhone are unhealthily attached. That's despite it being 1 1/2 times the weight of the phone it replaced, several times the price, costing much more each month and with a battery that's drained after about five hours' use.
It's the phone's design elegance that is irresistible.
Connected to a Wi-Fi network, it's a great device for browsing the internet and managing email, even with its small screen. Doing the same over Vodafone's 3G network, however, quickly chews through your data allowance.
The touch screen is easy and accurate to use to locate and call contacts, to drive the iPod music player and to flick through photos. The Maps program, with the phone's GPS, is eerily good at giving directions from anywhere to anywhere.
The iPhone doesn't have everything. But Apple's App Store, from where programs written by third-party application developers can be downloaded - many of them free - is the next best thing.
I've shelled out US$1.29 ($1.70) for a basic voice recorder. Next I want to find VoIP software that will let me make cheap calls anywhere in the world using the internet.
Bob O'Driscoll, a retired associate professor of electronics at Massey University, was consumed by similar exuberance when he encountered the iPhone's sibling, the iPod touch - essentially the same device, but without the phone.
"I wasn't all that excited about it until I saw one at a local retailer and started playing with it. After using it and seeing how beautifully it worked, I just had to have one," he explains.
O'Driscoll says the sophisticated integration of software and hardware won him over.
Tying the two together in such a small device is no easy task, says Paul Lyons, a computer interface specialist at Massey.
"It's a genuinely hard problem, and it doesn't have the sort of cut-and-dried `right' answer that lots of programmers imagine it does." But Apple is the acknowledged expert at it, according to Lyons.
Phew - my exuberance may not have been irrational after all.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
