Following the February 2008 announcement that all entering freshmen would receive an iPhone or iPod Touch, ACU received unprecedented attention from around the world. Instead of attempting to restrict student use of communication devices to out-of-class activities, ACU proposed to intentionally incorporate these emerging technologies into higher education. Deploying mobile devices to freshmen provided unique opportunities to explore the potentials and challenges facing the use of fully-converged mobile devices for both academic and social purposes. A year later, it appears that the program has been a marked success. This paper presents an overview of our experiences to date, detailing results from student and faculty surveys conducted during the first year of the Mobile Learning Initiative (MLI). Results show that faculty and student respondents were mutually positive about the overall success and impact of the program. Similarly, both students and faculty with iPhones reported increased levels of device usage and more positive perceptions of device potential in comparison to colleagues with the iPod Touch. Significant positive findings were observed for dimensions of student engagement and for several aspects of faculty adoption. Furthermore, clear challenges to the overall success of this program were observed in relation to incomplete classroom saturation and limited resources for application development. The MLI has visibly changed the way we work and teach, transforming our faculty into teaching-experimenters and fostering a culture of innovation on our campus. On the basis of these results, it appears that the transition toward utilization of converged mobile devices in higher educational settings is both promising and inevitable. Implications of the findings from our first year and the need for more sophisticated and collaborative research efforts are also described.