NEW YORK — Apple Store employees are a little tense today. They got nine hours of training preparing for today's iPhone 3G launch. Then there was all the press and hoopla when the day finally began. (I overheard two of them complaining about it: "I felt like I was going to vomit," one said. The other: "I felt like was as going to vomit too!") Then there was the crowd control. Then the iTunes Store, required to activate phones and thereby complete sales, went down. I snuck a hidden camera into the Fifth Avenue Apple Store and surveyed the chaos. Roll the clip. Meanwhile, here's a reader's account of an experience at an Apple Store in Walnut Creek, California:

NEW YORK — To get to the front of the line for the 3G iPhone here at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store takes about two hours of waiting from back to front. All for a device that probably won't work until tomorrow, thanks to a crash of Apple's activation system. It's much quicker — about two minutes — to just walk from the front to the back. Play the clip to ogle the desperate iPhone-seeking horde.

NEW YORK — I'm sitting outside the Fifth Avenue Apple Store here in New York, writing up a post about the long line for the iPhone, when a pretty girl wearing aviator sunglasses and a white blouse sits next to the guy sitting next to me. She says to her friend: "So I've got a date with Dan." "Who?" the guy asks. "The guy who was first in line — the guy who bought the first iPhone today. He's doing the documentary thing, his name is Dan."

As Apple started to ring up sales of its new iPhone 3G, the scene at the flagship Apple Store in San Francisco was much quieter than last year. By 8 p.m. last night only 12 people were in line, and by 4 a.m. only 40. By 7:45 a.m. this morning, the line had grown past 325, nearly to the length it was at last year's launch, with Apple Store employees dispensing coffee and water to the waiting crowd. One man, who had taken the 20th spot in line, was trying to sell it (unsuccessfully) for $100. How did Robert Scoble get into the first 20 allowed into the store? He had his friend wait 36 hours in line, sleeping in a tent. (At San Francisco's minimum wage, you and your friends owe the guy $351, Scoble.) How was the turnout in Palo Alto? Lame. New York? Lame. Vancouver? Lame. Meanwhile, the news about the coincidental Apple TV update went by nearly unnoticed, and Apple bungled the release of MobileMe. So while there was a crowd, even here in the heart of Apple country, the pictures after the jump show the religious fervor is considerably less intense than before.

Apple's new, faster 3G iPhones go on sale in the U.S. tomorrow, but a new store where Apple will sell third-party iPhone applications opened for business today. (Something to do with when the iPhone 3G went on sale in New Zealand. Those international date lines are so confusing!) The apps mostly range from free to costing $10, and you buy them on iTunes like you would an album or a TV show. Here are ten that will crush your last remaining resistance to Apple CEO Steve Jobs's demands.

And you thought Canadians were all nice. After whinging about not getting the first-generation iPhone in a timely way, Rogers Wireless customers shrieked about the rate plans for the latest handsets. Then a rumor quickly spread that mercurial gadget guru Steve Jobs's sensibilities were offended by the wireless company's price gouging and denied them the new phones at the last minute. First, since when has Jobs been against gouging customers? Second, the company sent out a release today promising our northern neighbors they will begin getting gouged on schedule. [Rogers Wireless]

British wireless carrier O2 saw its website fail after receiving 13,000 preorders per second for Apple's new iPhone 3G. Whatever happened to British reserve? [Digital Daily]

First, in my tests, the iPhone 3G’s battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks. This is an especially significant problem because, unlike most other smart phones, the iPhone has a sealed battery that can’t be replaced with a spare.

Everyone likes to talk up Apple's innovative design. It's a much more attractive story than the real reason why Apple has come to dominate first the MP3 player market, and soon, the smartphone market: Ruthless haggling with suppliers to lock up crucial components, shutting out rivals. Apple is buying 50 million 8-gigabyte memory chips from Samsung — the kind used in its entry-level iPhone 3G — and Samsung is cutting off other customers as a result of tight supplies. [DigiTimes]

US customers will be able to purchase new iPhones without locking themselves into a two-year contract with AT&T. It'll just cost an extra $400 — $599 for one with 8 gigabytes of storage, $699 for one with 16 gigabytes. Customers will still have to sign up for an AT&T wireless subscription, but it won't have the same penalties for changing carriers. Analysts figure it costs Apple about $173 to manufacture each iPhone, and believe Apple is selling the phones to AT&T at about $400 each. That means that at $599, Apple and AT&T are roughly splitting the extra $400 profit on an unlocked phone. Almost makes you wonder why AT&T bothers to sell subscriptions.

ComScore reports that there were 1.5 million searches for the word "iPhone," 88.4 percent of them answered by Google. One wonders how many of the searches were performed on an iPhone. [ITwire]

Obviously tired of being pestered with questions about iPhone this and Steve Jobs that, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg put on a tinfoil hat and sat down for an interview with the Financial Times:

Manufacturing and material costs add up to $173 for each 3G iPhone, analysis firm iSuppli Corp reports. That's 35 percent and $92 less than iSuppli estimated it cost Apple to build the original iPhone last year. Credit Apple CEO Steve Jobs' sharp elbows with component suppliers, who's price cuts account for most of the decrease. Expect that overhead to drop, and margins to rise, when Apple can being leveraging PA Semi-designed chips in the devices. (Photo by AP/Sakuma)

Finland mobile device maker Nokia will acquire the 52 percent of mobile operating system-maker Symbian it didn't already own from private investors Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, Sweden's Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson, Panasonic Mobile Communications Co. and Siemens AG for $410 million. Nokia plans to turn the Symbian operating system into an open source software platform to rival Google's Android and Apple's iPhone OS X software. Symbian's 1,000 developers will join Nokia as employees and Symbian itself will continue as a non-profit foundation responsible for marketing the OS.

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

After an interview with employee Dan Frommer, Silicon Alley Insider publisher Henry Blodget received a "threat" from an Apple shareholder who didn't like the pair's skepticism about the market for iPhone applications and the stock's performance. But rather than go after Blodget for shorting AAPL, why not mention that the analysis comes from a man who had to settle a fraud suit and was kicked out of the financial business? That seems easier. [Silicon Alley Insider]

How to grow the iPod market beyond the faddish, technofetishistic trendizen crowd? Analysts, and Apple, are looking to the corporate market, with better security, email support and GPS. The problem? The device is tethered to a single carrier, Apple hasn't played nice with corporate IT in the past and, frankly, the suits bore Steve Jobs. And you are never, ever, to bore Steve Jobs. The real problem is that customers might want to keep the iPhone a personal device to lug around with their Blackberry and company laptop — so that they can have a personal browser free from management's all-seeing eye.

Now made for masturbating during overlong board meetings or car trips — the iPhone. The burgeoning mobile porn business, which was once confined to slow-loading sepia-tinted Jpegs of flappers in bathing suits, now features all kinds of fun applets for erotic text chatting, "moan tones," and video. The $1.7 billion industry set to balloon even further once the iPhone 2.0 debuts on July 11. The Google search results on "iPhone porn" are tumescent, too, and there are many, many websites in existence that can cater to all your hand-held smut needs. Here are a few:

This just in: Deals advertised on Craigslist may not be as fabulous as they appear. Just ask the 12 New Yorkers who responded to an ad on the site offering discounted iPhones in bulk, thinking they were in for a steal, which they were—just not in the way they expected. After showing up to conduct the transactions in locations that scream you're about to be robbed!—deserted corners of Flatbush and Flatlands—the naifs were robbed at gunpoint by four teenaged hoods. In one case, the four made off with as much as $2,000 in cash. Of course, if you want to buy your iPhones in bulk and sell them for a hefty profit, you don't have risk life and limb. Even if you hit the Apple store and pay $399 for the first-generation model, you'll still generate a nice return when you offload them to a Russian plutocrat for $700 a piece.