This had better work.

That was my cranky response after our days-long odyssey to buy an iPhone 3G. It ended in a crowded Kahala Apple store with limited stock and the scooping up of the only type of phone available: a 16GB with a white back.

Let me say up front that there’s still no copy-and-paste functionality in the iPhone. The tiny keys remain a major frustration, so if you’ve got fat fingers consider another smart phone — or digit surgery.

The iPhone’s attraction for me is its speed, ability to push my business e-mail and the sheer coolness of its swish and tap interface.

But while the phone’s chichi index is high, it’s the applications that I was eager to try. I’m not alone in saying that the programs available in the App Store for both the iPhone and iTouch are really what Apple should be crowing about.

Here is my favorite and among the best of the breed from other tech bloggers:

• Evernote (free): See my review on this Web-based program, now with an iPhone edition. Evernote allows you to gather notes from Web pages, to-do lists, grocery lists and photos, then search for them by keywords, even within pictures. All of these notes are accessible on both your computer and phone. You can easily send camera pictures to your Evernote account, which is what I did when I visited a local bookstore and took pixs of books to check out later online.

• Remote (free): Engadget likes this application that turns the iPhone into a remote controller for your Apple TV or iTunes, perfect if you’re inclined to sit two feet from your computer choosing ABBA songs. You know who you are.

• Urbanspoon (free): New York Times writer David Pogue video blogs about several apps that use the location service (Apple does not use the term GPS), including Urbanspoon that helps you locate restaurants based on where you are. Don’t like the suggestions? Just shake the iPhone for other options.

• Facebook (free): AppleInsider lauds several social networking applications, including AOL’s instant messaging service AIM and Facebook’s iPhone app, which allows you to post pictures though not write on your Wall quite yet. There are a couple of Twitter apps as well.

• Business programs: TheStreet.com reviews several applications, including free tip calculators and Salesforce Mobile (free if you have a qualified license) and the $499 SAP Business One program, priced more than even the 16GB iPhone.

You don’t need to take our word on these applications; check out the reader reviews in the App Store. Or post your own best-worst choices here.

If you browse the Web with any frequency, you are well-acquainted with the problem of organizing the digital ephemera that can pile up on your desktop like laundry after a vacation.

Or you may have experienced the forehead-thumping frustration of trying to recall a certain memorable wine, but when you are ready to buy it, the name turns out to be less than memorable.

If you could capture all of those scraps of information from the Web and the wine labels or business cards that you snapped with your camera phone, and have all of it searchable in one place, wouldn’t life be a bit easier?

Then, take a look at Evernote, a Web site that can help organize all of life’s Post-it notes on your desktop and cell phone.

Evernote has a Web clipping feature that lets you highlight and save info from any site to your account. You can then tag it with keywords and search for it later. You can also take a picture with your cell phone, attach keywords and send it to your account. A mobile Web client lets you access your accumulated information even when you are on the road.

Here are some of the tasks you can accomplish with Evernote: compare products from different sites side-by-side, list the books you want to remember to read, jot down the movies you want to order, save a map to a new store or snap pictures of that hard-to-find restaurant with the great adobo.

Evernote calls itself “your external brain,” which is not an inaccurate description for the things it can do. It’s clearly in better working order than my internal brain.

Evernote has an iPhone app that I’ll be downloading as part of a review of the new 3G phone next week. Some reviewers say the iPhone app has editing limitations, but we’ll check it out.

Now, if Evernote could only do the laundry…

I don’t think Apple and AT&T want me to get an iPhone.

We have now gone to six stores in two states and still no iPhone. Apple’s Kahala and Ala Moana stores were both sold out as of noon today and a worker at the AT&T Kapiolani store said call back later this afternoon.

The Instinct and Voyager are beginning to look pretty good.

Our Webmaster, Scott Morifuji, had a very disappointing experience in signing up for his phones, so I’m hoping he’ll blog about it shortly. It was a lesson in why you can’t take any store employee at his word when he says, “Trust me.”

Battery life appears to be a major issue with these phones. Scott keeps the 3G on and notes that by noon his charge is half gone. John Garcia turns his brightness down and doesn’t use 3G all the time, and still the drain is pretty noticeable.

If you bought an iPhone, let us know what your experience has been, good, bad or in between.

I promise to keep the drooling to a minimum.

So now we’re at the Northpark shopping complex in Dallas at noon and the Apple Store line is at least 200 long and growing.

So much for our strategy to snare an iPhone.

Security is very evident here. The guards in uniform look like HPD officers eager to throw any bad boy or girl in jail. The well-dressed crowd, however, hasn’t broken out in a riot quite yet.

I hate to be such a wimp, but I’m bailing out of this pursuit, otherwise I’ll spend the rest of my day in line. We’ll try tomorrow or wait until we’re home.

Scott, John: I concede, and eagerly await your unboxing pixs!

According to Engadget, Apple is having trouble activating phones right now.

This also extends to people upgrading to the latest 2.0 firmware on the original iPhone. If you run the upgrade now, you’ll be left with a bricked phone until the activation servers come back online.

There are already two people in line who ran the upgrade before coming here, and their phones are dead right now.

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6:15 - Apple employees are serving Starbucks coffee

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Just got off the phone with Sandee. The at&t store that she’s at ran out of phones.

She’s going to try and find an apple store to see if she can get one.