As expected, Apple has hit a home run with the launch of its iPhone, but AT&T countered with a pop fly to center over the weekend. Some first-day iPhoners waited hours and even days in some cases before they were able to activate their new gadgets on the AT&T network, causing plenty of frustration for early adopters who camped out ahead of the June 29 launch day.

A friend in my office bought one at the Green Hills Apple store at 7 p.m. Friday not long after the humongous line had dissipated. His wife decided to take the plunge at 10 p.m. the same evening. The family’s first iPhone activated minutes after purchase, but iPhone number two held up until Sunday evening before signing on with AT&T.

It’s never good to generate tons of hype and then have trouble delivering upon the promise, but analyst Rob Enderle makes a solid observation about how both AT&T and Apple can respond:

Depending on how the companies handle customer’s complaints, it could in fact help, he said. If customers feel the company has treated them well, they are more likely to buy and recommend its products in the future. “It doesn’t matter whether your product breaks or not,” Enderle said. “It matters how well you treat your customers.”

I agree. We’re all human and make plenty of mistakes, even big ones. What matters most is how we react when things don’t go the way we planned. People will be more likely to forgive a glitch such as this, in my opinion, if they receive good customer service along the way, but bad customer service can crush even a great product if it is bad enough.

Even Crave, CNET’s blog about technology, isn’t fast enough to keep up with the pace of innovation. Here’s a post from Monday (emphasis added):

If there were no buttons on your cell phone, imagine how big the screen could be…

Synaptics is doing just that with its Onyx phone (below), a new concept in cell phone technology. Shaped like a remote, it’s a bar-style phone that would integrate GPS, music, teleconferencing and calendar events.

But the coolest part is the screen, which takes up nearly the whole handset. Synaptics calls it ClearPad, a thin, high-resolution touch screen based on the company’s proprietary sensing technology. With it, there would be no need for buttons to input information. Information can be entered into the Onyx concept phone with two fingers, or via text entry.

Unfortunately, no company is planning on releasing this phone anytime soon, but the Onyx is out there and could be an indicator of what’s to come in the design of mobile handsets.

On Tuesday, Steve Jobs confirmed that “not anytime soon” is this coming June. Apple will release the iPhone (above) this summer, and I have to say that it looks revolutionary even for Apple. The iPhone seems remarkably similar in concept to the Onyx, although on first glance it looks better implemented.

The iPhone has been rumored for weeks, but I honestly didn’t think it would be this significant a leap forward in technology. I have to confess that I don’t care for the iPod’s proprietary format that won’t allow the use of subscription music services, so I don’t know if I’ll be an early adopter. I’ll probably hold out to see if Palm or anyone else building for the Palm OS can develop a comparable alternative, but I’m sold so far on this new interface.

I think it’s wild to see Crave highlight what appeared to be a distant technology on one day, only to see a similar (and possibly better) innovation launch the following day. Things are moving fast around here, and they aren’t slowing down anytime soon.