Josh Martin noted this morning that the Boston Apple store had a significant line of people this morning waiting for 3G iPhones. My son Robert and I also stopped by and estimated the line at about 500 people. Since Robert is in the market for an iPhone 3G, we thought we’d stop by again at noontime to see if there was still a line. These photos show that there was, albeit shorter. My guess is that there are still about 250 people in line as seen in the attached photo. But we have much to be thankful for — at least it isn’t the crowd of more than 1,000 that queued up outside the Softbank Mobile store in Tokyo. And Japanese consumers are notoriously hard to impress with a mobile phone.

I’m sure there are people still queuing up for the iPhone throughout the day, but I wonder whether those lines throughout the day are mostly because AT&T required that Apple do in-store activation for iPhones. Last year, Apple sold out their iPhone stocks in hours because consumers could activate them at home through iTunes. This year, perhaps not so much.

But despite the excitement about the new iPhone 3G, I believe it’s the first generation iPhone owners who should be most happy. Why? Because the release of the iPhone 2.0 software and Apple’s AppStore gave them the software equivalent of a new phone as well.

Think about it. If you owned an iPhone last month, you just had a decent phone, an amazing mobile Web browser, and a terrific video iPod. But today, that same device has been upgraded to be a platform that supports an AOL instant messaging client, a signal analyzer, a fantastic mobile gaming console (you haven’t seen mobile gaming until you’ve played the new Super Monkey Ball or the iPhone Texas Hold’em), and about 300 other applications that are tougher to categorize. Not bad for a free upgrade. And even better, you can buy those applications from the store from the iPhone itself; you don’t have to sideload them through iTunes.

Ever since the Boston Apple store opened, some here at Yankee Group have been complaining that it has been vacuuming money out of our wallets. With the advent of the AppStore, Apple has upped the ante: they can now vacuum money out of our wallets from Anywhere.