Today, along with a reported 500,000 other people, I picked up an iPhone. We waited in line in 110F heat for about 90 minutes and were among the first 25 in one of many local AT&T stores. Sadly, that was the easy part of the day.

The iPhone looks to be an amazing device, but right now I’m using it as an iPhone Shuffle. I can listen to music but not much else. The coolest feature so far is the play/pause button on the headphones. At this point, I was hoping to be testing out Dojo apps, but tonight has been anything but an “it just works” experience.

At the AT&T store, we discovered that we could not use a business name on our phones. Memo to Apple and AT&T: businesses spend money. After grudgingly putting our phones under my name (4 phone line limit for the family plan apparently), we went home to activate the phones. And that’s when the fun began.

Basically, you cannot access the phone’s user interface without activating the phone. So we entered a lengthy list of information to transfer the phone lines from Verizon to AT&T. What was advertised as a quick easy process instead resulted in this email:

Phone service is scheduled to be disconnected on your current phone at or after 12:33 AM EDT on July 01. Please check your email and be prepared to reconnect and activate your iPhone before that time. Please call 877-800-3701 if you’d like to make other arrangements. You will receive an email to (my email address) as soon as your iPhone is ready to be activated. After you activate your iPhone and before your phone number is transferred from your current provider you will continue to receive calls on your current phone. Your iPhone will be able to make outgoing calls but will not receive calls until the transfer is complete.

So now I sit and wait, and wait, and wait, with 4 phones sitting on my desk that we cannot yet use. I don’t mean to complain, but what’s the point of waiting in line to get a phone right away if the system for activating your phone can’t handle demand, and you can’t do anything with the phone out the box except play music without a display. I’m sure it will get better and these problems will be a distant memory in two days. The device looks really really nice, but I was hoping this blog post would instead be a bunch of screenshots of Dojo 0.9 demos running on the iPhone. I expect more.

3 Responses to “iFrustrated: iNoActivation/iPhone shuffle”

  1. on 30 Jun 2007 at 0:52joey

    I had the same problem. I called and they told me that iTunes somehow sent them data about a totally different AT&T phone plan that does not work with the iPhone via some kind of glitch. My account was transfered to a different department that is backed up handling this.

    I called again later and they guy denied the problem and simply said “It takes 24hrs to activate”. Sounds like they are covering their asses but obviously screwed something up bigtime.

  2. on 30 Jun 2007 at 15:18Dylan

    Two sources of problems here so far:

    1. the original number was under a tax id number that does not match up with my social security number

    2. my original number was in a different state than where I bought the new phone,and they were refusing to allow me to port the number

    The solution: treat each phone as a new line, port nothing, then call 888.898.7685 and have AT&T merge them into a family plan and initiate the phone number transfer manually.

  3. on 30 Jun 2007 at 22:21Dylan

    Update: 3 phones are now working… the 4th has to go back to AT&T after 4 hours on the phone with them. Apparently they fscked up the SIM card while activating the phone. I loathe AT&T, and loathe their arrogance, attitude, inability to fix anything, and their determination to pass the buck every chance they get.

Leave a Reply