For Christmas, I got to upgrade my iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4. If you are from Canada, you probably know that took some effort on my part.

The iPhone 4 came out in Canada in what… July? It STILL takes a great deal of patience to get one, if you are trying to upgrade on an existing plan. If you go to a Rogers store, unless they’ve just received their shipment within the last 5 minutes, you won’t find one. And even if they did receive a shipment, it’s only a few phones and, chances are, there are people already there waiting for those few phones.

The place to go is the Apple Store in downtown Vancouver. The time to go is hours before opening. Actually, it’s not as bad as it was several months ago. People were lining up at 3, 4, 5 o’clock in the morning! Nowadays, you have to get there about 8 to 8:30. They open at 10. Someone comes out before opening and sets up appointments, they can only do so many upgrades a day. That’s the thing, they have plenty of stock now, but they can only do so many upgrades a day.

We got there about 8:15, and I thought it would be at least 9:30 before someone came out to make appointments, but they came out at 8:45. My appointment wasn’t until 1pm. But, finally, I got iPhone 4! The people at the Apple store are troopers. It’s crowded, people are frustrated and every single person I spoke with was patient and cheerful. The guy who hooked me up told me I have an American accent. Nu-uh. I’m PacNW baby, we have an anti-accent.

I have not yet tried out Face Time, but by playing around with the camera I can see there is no way to do it and not look like crap. So don’t use Face Time to set up a first date or anything. But if you can handle crappy, I’m available for Face Time.