I finally have an iPhone 3G. It does all of the things that my other iPhone did, it’s not quite as hefty and the battery life isn’t quite as good, but I have a new iPhone. More importantly my daughter has the old iPhone.
As of my last writing, I had decided to simply avoid the lines and the crazy in-store activation process, forced upon us by some uncaring AT&T exec, and order a phone on “fulfillment.” Armed with all of my information I approached the AT&T counter (with my daughter in tow) “I’d like to order an iPhone on fulfillment” – thinking that if I used the AT&T lingo they wouldn’t treat me as some neophyte – I already have an iPhone after all. The salesperson went right into the standard explanation of the process “… blah, blah, … it’s taking between 10 and 20 days to get the phones … blah, blah, and then you can come in and we’ll activate your phone.” “Wait a minute, 10 to 20 days? I thought it took 7 days?” “No, we can’t really be sure when we’ll get the phone but we’re averaging 10 to 20 days, sometimes more.” Of course this was a non-starter for a 16 year-old -- nearly a month? School will have started already! So off we went in search of an Apple store (again).
I offered to get up early and do the 6 AM mall crawl, as you probably already know a 16 year-old would rather wait an entire year for a new phone than get into a vehicle at 5 AM and be seen with her dad at the local mall, so we chose a quiet Sunday afternoon arriving at 11 AM as the store opened. We were 10th in line and I set the stopwatch on my iPhone so that I might record the time it took to complete the process. Now I have a very unscientific sample of two, and can report that it takes on average at least 20 minutes per activation, we were in line for 1:58:06 and had a working iPhone by 2:09:17. Later, one of the AT&T store guys told me he stood in line for 6 hours at an Apple store, hopefully that was an anomaly.
So to pass the time we chatted with the other customers in line. We must have told 100 passers-by that we weren’t waiting in line to get into the store but were waiting for an iPhone. Most of them wished us well and gingerly stepped over the threshold of the store as if they weren’t really sure if it was OK to do so. I got us lunch and we took turns sitting at a nearby table so as not to lose our place in line.
On the whole, it wasn’t the worst way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t set foot inside a mall for 12 months so I was probably due. We had a nice time and for a brief instant my knowledge of technology made me popular with my 16 year-old – of course that will wear off quickly.
Once we were at home I was reminded of how easy the iPhone 2G activation was; the process of switching my daughter from an old RAZR to the iPhone was the same. Remove the SIM card, erase the phone, insert new SIM card, attach to iTunes and the phone activates. Less than 15 minutes this time.
I was reminded of a discussion we’d been having at Burton about software activation recently -- many of us berating Microsoft for the Vista activation process. I use a Mac, so I don’t get to complain too loudly about Microsoft. The daily lack of frustration more than makes up for my need to vent to others, if necessary I can find other topics (such as this one!). There were clearly parallel notions in the Vista complaints that compare to what I’d been feeling with regard to iPhone activation. One excerpt from the discussion seemed to put it best:
It seems that Microsoft is more interested in extracting a pound of flesh in the short term than it is in really serving the needs of the customer. When a company starts from the assumption that its good, paying customers are likely trying to steal from them, that’s a bad sign.
And while I agree that this fairly characterizes certain aspects of the software industry’s attempt to curtail piracy, it also hits AT&T Wireless squarely in the forehead. Rather than make light of the fact that AT&T is the only carrier with a non-subsidized phone worthy of the effort to unlock it and put it on a network other than AT&T (and excluding Verizon, AT&T’s largest competitor, who doesn’t support GSM). Or deal with the press coverage of iPhone 3G ending up in Hong Kong on a black market, AT&T chose to treat all of us as would-be criminals.
So if after reading this, you’re still in the market for an iPhone, expect to spend at least 2 hours at your local Apple store (or wait 10-20 days and make two trips to AT&T). Something they don’t tell you until you’re in line -- if you switched to AT&T for the iPhone, you have another year left on your “commitment” to AT&T and that means you don’t get the $199 and $299 pricing on iPhone 3G. Check with AT&T before you get your hopes up, perhaps some complaining will help the process along.
If I had it to do over again I’d have bought a used iPhone 2G on eBay long before the 3G phone was introduced. Even a new iPhone 2G in May would have saved me a lot of time come August. In either case, I’m sure I could have arranged next-day shipping and had a second iPhone 2G working in less than 24 hours. Sure 3G is fast but WiFi is faster. I might have missed an afternoon with my daughter in a mall – next Sunday I’ll just take her fishing.
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