Mike Segar/Reuters

Adding accounts from Twitter and eyewitness reports from Bits commenters.

Despite icy temperatures in New York on Thursday morning, people eager to buy an iPhone that is compatible with Verizon’s wireless network filed into Apple and Verizon stores.

Thursday is the first day that the iPhone is widely available for sale from a wireless carrier other than AT&T in the United States. Verizon and Apple started selling the Verizon version of the iPhone in their stores around the country at 7 a.m., as well as in their online stores. Best Buy and several hundred Wal-Mart stores also planned to have the phone. Photos on Twitter showed modest lines at some stores; here is a roundup.

Damon Darlin, The Times’s technology editor, reports that in downtown San Francisco, nearly two dozen anxious iPhone customers were queued up outside of a Verizon store as early as 6:45 a.m. Only two people were sitting outside the city’s flagship Apple store half a block away. At that location, the camera crews outnumbered iPhone buyers.

Many people have noted, both on Twitter and in our comments section, that many Apple and Verizon stores seemed to have prepared for a much larger crush of customers than they received.

On Twitter, Julio Ojeda-Zapata posted a picture of an empty Apple store in Minneapolis, with the caption, “What if Apple threw a party and no one came?” He added: “At Mall of America NO ONE is lined up at Apple store for Verizon iPhone.”

A Bits commenter, “Romy,” relayed an account of purchasing an iPhone in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan

“The store was filled with many extra employees who had apparently been ordered to applaud customers as they entered,” he or she wrote. “We were the only ones there.”

It could be that some are simply choosing to order online, or perhaps many are waiting to see whether or not a new iPhone will be announced this summer.

Either way, the muted enthusiasm is in sharp contrast to the initial introduction of the iPhone 4 on AT&T’s network in June, when stores were selling out and hundreds of people waited in lines at Apple stores across the country.

At least one area of the country is expecting unusually high interest in the phone. North and South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, which are not serviced by AT&T, will now be able to purchase an iPhone from Verizon.

If you pursued a Verizon iPhone 4 this morning, what was your experience like? Let us know in the comments.