“Here are two postcards from the front lines of the smartphone wars,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.

“The first, at right, shows three college students from Monclair, N.J. — Matt Dodd, 18, Sam Epstein,18, and Keith Hobin, 19 — huddled under borrowed umbrellas in front of Apple’s flagship New York Fifth Avenue store to buy the latest in multitouch cellular technology,” Elmer-DeWitt reports. “They arrived at 7 a.m. EDT, 24 hours before Apple is scheduled to begin selling the new iPhone 3G S to the public. The heavy rain hadn’t let up since they arrived and the forecast was calling for more rain into the night.”

“The second, below, appeared on the Japanese website +D Mobile (English translation). It shows the roughly 200 customers who queued up Thursday morning near the Softbank flagship store in Tokyo’s Omotesando shopping district to reserve their new iPhones, which won’t arrive in Japan until June 26,” Elmer-DeWitt reports.

Elmer-DeWitt reports, “According a second report, smaller lines had also formed at Softbank outlets throughout the city and at many of the electronics stores that line Tokyo’s Akihabara Electric Town.”

Full article, with the photos, here.

MacDailyNews Take: Cool umbrellas, guys. Will it ever stop raining in New York?

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "JES42" for the heads up.]