A few were disappointed Apple hadn’t given them chairs or a spot against the wall where they could wait. They felt a bit as if they were in a fishbowl.

Chris Silva, 21, of Narragansett, sat at the front of the line with his PowerBook. He was perusing the Web site MacRumors.com to see what new information he could learn about the iPhones and sharing information with others on line. He’s eager to get his hands on the iPhone.

“What isn’t there about the iPhone that I want?,” he replied when asked which features he most wanted.

He’s excited about the visual voice mail, which will allow him to view who has left messages for him and when and then decide in which order he wants to listen to his voice mail messages. And he’s glad he’ll be able to fast forward and rewind messages by touching a scroll bar on the iPhone, he said.

He has his mind set. He wants the more expensive version of the iPhone, which is selling for $499 with 4 Gigs of memory and $599 for 8 Gigs.

Silva said the MacRumors site is reporting that the flagship Apple stores will have 1,000 iPhones each for sale. Granted, Providence probably isn’t one of the flagship stores, but at the front of the line, Silva wasn’t worried about not getting one of the coveted iPhones.

When someone walked by and asked what the line was for, a few at the front replied they were waiting to buy the iPhone. The passer-by said he’d just order his online.

“But he won’t get it until Tuesday or Wednesday,” said one of the men at the front of the line.

One of the first six people to make up the line, Bassem Megally, 27, hails from Milwaukee, Wis., but he was quick to say that he hadn’t traveled all the way from Wisconsin to buy his iPhone from The Apple Store in Providence.

He’s in the capital city to help his cousin at the Transformers BotCon convention at the Rhode Island Convention Center. He was glad to come help, but he told his cousin he’d need to find an Apple store where he could get his iPhone while here for the convention.

Those near the front of the line were making friends and said they felt like one big family by 10 a.m.

Want to know more about the phone? Projo.com's Sheila Lennon has blogged advance reviews from a variety of tech experts.

Projo.com staff writer Kate Bramson knows a thing or two about making friends while waiting in a line. She met her husband hoping to buy tickets to the Women’s Olympic Figure Skating final in Norway in 1994. That was the year of the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding controversy – which meant no extra tickets for Kate, her mom or the man she’d later marry.