I received an iPhone 3GS in the mail today. I’m always excited to receive a new toy but to be honest I wasn’t as excited as I would’ve been had the box said Newegg on the side. This is my first Apple iPhone and first smart phone. My old Motorola RAZR was on its last leg so I decided three weeks ago to finally replace it. Luckily for me AT&T had difficulty procuring a regular 3G iPhone and the phone was placed on backorder because the announcement of the new 3G S came a few days later. I decided to purchase the 3G S for $199 instead of paying $150 for a refurbished regular 3G.

I’ve been playing around with the phone for the better part of the evening after spending 45 minutes with customer support. It seems everyone is having trouble activating their phones due to the high volume of activations but I followed the advice of how to activate your new iPhone 3G S to quickly resolve my activation problem.

Earlier today I read that Apple has sold around 1 million 3G S models since launch which is twice what analysts were expecting (I believe this came from Slashdot but I can’t recall). I also read that Apple patched 46 vulnerabilities in the iPhone recently as well. This has me somewhat worried given the amount of information and control Apple has over my phone and contract with AT&T.

Being an iPhone and iTunes newbie I do what most newbies do at first: poke around. What better way to learn? I came across a category called “iTunes U” which lists audio and video tracks provided by numerous universities such as MIT, Stanford, Duke, etc. I’m sure many of you know about MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative but if you don’t you should give it a look.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare caught my eye because I know they provide excellent free courses. You can find Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (254 tracks), Mathematics (258 tracks), Physics (103 tracks), and others like History, Brain & Cognitive Studies, and Biology that are available to you. This is a great feature of the iPhone in my opinion because now I can easily learn about something while on the go. During the academic year I spend a lot of time traveling to and from campus and now I’m able to watch and listen to something educational while taking public transportation (reading every day gets old). That is why everyone has a smart phone isn’t it?

In addition to iTunes U there are also ebook readers like “ereader” and Kindle for iPhone. I’m eager to try these applications and see what they can offer a knowledge hungry mind.

On a final note, I’ll definitely be using the free Wi-Fi finder application!