After about two and three-quarter hours of waiting at the Soho Apple store on Sunday, I got my hands on a new iPhone. I went 16 gig and black. The black was to assuage my guilt at getting the 16 gig, as getting a white phone is an immediate indicator that you laid down the $299 for the bigger model. I'm not sure I really needed the storage. But I do know that I don't need to broadcast to the world that I coughed up the money for it.

Anyway, I digress. At some point I'll write up a review post of the new phone. Jane has a first generation model, which we upgraded to 2.0 on Thursday, so some of the bloom was off the rose by the time I got my phone in my grubby little hands. But here is a random collection of some of the neat things that I really like about it so far:

1) Shazam! This iPhone app, free in the apps store, is simply amazing. Hold up the phone to a song playing on the radio or television. It identifies the title and artist and with a click, you can buy the song on iTunes. The first time Jane and I tried it our jaws dropped and we just stared at each other for like 30 seconds. It's magic, plain and simple.

2) Screen shots. It's the sort of thing that I wouldn't have every imagined my old Blackberry 8700 could do. Hold down the home key and tap the sleep button (up on top) once, and it files a screen cap into your photo album. From there you can email it right to your inbox.

3) The magnifier bubble. After some frustrating experiences fat-fingering my typing, I discovered a trick. Press down for a moment on the text at hand, and a magnifying bubble pops up, allowing you to micro-navigate your typing. It's a brilliant use of some tiny real estate.

All right, now here are the things I want:

1) Flickr integration. How insane is it that there's not an official Flickr app for uploading photos right from the iPhone? I've got a camera, an Internet hook-up, and a Flickr account. Is it that hard to put the three together?

2) More battery! It seems to be draining away quite quickly. I'm willing to believe that there's some users error here, as I don't quite know exactly which settings draw power and when. I'm going to give these suggestions a try.