AfterTek

At 5 this morning people from all over were lining up outside AT&T stores all across the country waiting for their chance to get their hands on the new iPhone 3G. Close to 20 or more people were waiting when stores across the nation opened. People who didn’t know what was going on thought that it was Black Friday coming a few months too early.

Even customers who own the original iPhone were staying busy today to try to get all of the new features and programs onto their phones. The new programs started to release Thursday night. Close to 500 games, programs, entertainment and business applications were ready to be downloaded and added to the older phones.

Some are free, most of them are between $4.99 and $9.99. All you need to do is hook your iPhone to your computer, access the Apple iTunes store and find yourself automatically connected to the new App Store, where you are presented by new applications like an iPhone version of the Facebook Web service (free); a sophisticated arcade game called Monkey Ball ($9.99); Travelocity (free) for checking airplane trips and flight status reports; and Etch A Sketch ($4.99), which turns the iPhone screen it a digital version of the famous childhood toy.

Other programs include a college-level Spanish-English translation program ($29.99); Band ($9.99), which lets you create music and compose songs on the iPhone; MLB.com AT Bat ($4.99) that delivers real-time scores for all the big league baseball games, even telling you who’s currently at bat; and Salesforce.com ($9.99),a business application for keeping track of customers, managing orders and handling expenses and billing info.