Author: Jonathan Greene

I feel like I’ve spent more time (43 hours waiting on activation!) on this than most people so here’s some info for anyone having issues.

It’s DEFINITELY an ATT issue with porting of numbers. Porting unfortunately also includes Cingular. Thanks to the magic of corporate synergy (sarcasm), Cingular seems to have only changed in name and until you move into an iPhone or new locked ATT device (more on this in a moment), you are still clearly in the OLD system.

Yesterday Apple told me to speak to ATT about getting a new SIM, which ATT told me (at the store) was impossible. Today Apple told me (at the store) they had no SIMs to offer (I should speak to ATT!) and that they would NOT give me a new iPhone. Their POV was that the iPhone was fine and that it was just a matter of time… Around midnight I spoke to someone who was able to manually remove and re-add my iPhone to the plan and try an OTA activation … That was done again today and failed.

It was not until a call later today I learned there’s some magical bit that has to get associated with your account that until it does will leave you in limbo. My limbo lasted 43 hours… The magic bit is something called “Apple Tracking.” Until this is associated with your account, you will continue to see that you need more time for activation to occur.

During my dad’s activation this afternoon (after mine went through!) he encountered one hitch which is that he uses PayTrust to manage bills and that address (South Dakota) did not match where he was planning to use as his main address (outside Philadelphia). Amazingly ATT called within minutes of his second attempt to process and walked us through a walk-around. The suggestion was to set up a matching address with billing and usage and change once it’s activated. Once this was done, my dad’s iPhone activated a moment later. Knowing my issues well enough I suggested that instead of porting his number from Verizon, he go with a new ATT number and just port it later once everything was running.

The process is getting smoother but I am not sure that’s really because anything has been fixed, and more because enough time has passed for the customer reps to have a pooled an amount of learning and are actively sharing. Over the course of my conversations, the people seemed to have

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, AT&T, Apple

In speaking with ATT tonight I learned that my account was not configured correctly and now it is apparently. I still had a MediaMax (Cingular) data plan attached even though I had selected the iPhone data package as well as 1500 text messages. Neither were there. Interestingly that’s actually the same thing as what I already had – but not named iPhone.

Anyway.

The iPhone was removed and then added back manually by the customer service representative who tried several times to get an OTA activation going, but we were greeted by the standard “your activation requires more time.”

Information seems to be flowing in real-time with ATT and Apple… from the conversations I could hear between reps they are getting on-the-fly advice to try things in the system. Nothing seems to be working consistently. The only standard advice seems to be leave the iPhone connected to your system so as Apple batch processes things it will go through.

So … I think it’s actually on Apple’s end. Afterall my SIM works in my Nokia, but my iPhone sees NO bars and cannot complete it’s process.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, AT&T, Apple

It’s officially been 24 hours…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen those words in the past 24 hours, but it’s far more than I would like to admit. If you’ve followed my Jaiku or Twitters over the past day+, you know I still do not have an activated iPhone. This has been bothering me to such an extent that it actually disrupted sleep last night and gave mea headache for most of the day. To say I’ve been in a bad mood would be an understatement.

In case you’d like the short version… went through initial setup within minutes. (Actually was filming that for an unboxing video that will be far from relevant by the time I’m live with this thing.) Got to the more time needed BS message and sat looking dumfounded for a moment. About a minute or two later I got an email from the iTunes store stating the same thing and that I’d be notified by ATT when it was ready. About 15 hours later I got an email from ATT inviting me to the website to manage my account and all that usual getting started BS – which is extra BS for me as I am already a customer and have an account! Just shy of 18 hours later I got an email from ATT with a confirmation number confirming my processing – not activation of course, but that it was in progress. Nothing since …

My old phone SIM was killed by the activation process so there’s no going back to my prior devices. The iPhone SIM while reported to not work in anything else does in fact work in my Nokia phones (just tested this) and just confirms how messed up ATT is. If I can use the SIM, that means it’s been activated in the system and they have some very special extra lame system handling JUST iPhones which is the problem. It is “just” a phone anyway… regardless of how cool it might be.

I was told by Apple today that I could try a few things. First press the home and power buttons for a few seconds at startup until the logo screen appears… try it outside. Nothing. Apple also suggested I go to AT&T and get a new SIM which I did and was told a)they were not allowed to do that for iPhones and b) that would disrupt the process of activation since the SIM and IMEI are linked. This led me to try taking the SIM out and re-seating it. Nothing. BTW – the SIM is a 3G SIM and says so on both sides…. interesting.

I’m left with a few choices. 1 – Continue to suck it up and hope I magically activate soon. 2 – Kill this process with AT&T over the phone, go back to my other SIM once it activates (assuming it does) and then try again later with the iPhone. For now I’m sticking it out. Like some sick personal challenge, I can’t get beaten here.

I freaked on the ATT staff who shook their heads and hands and called (the same number!) customer support I’ve been dealing with but I somehow got to someone who seemed at least remotely in the loop – perhaps enough time had passed for training to occur. Anyway I pushed quite hard and was able to get a free month of voice service from the call – even though I am still without any service. I guess that and my hat will get me a free bowl of soup!

I’m out of thoughts here other than to try and chill. This is way beyond my control clearly and well beyond the control of anyone I’ve spoken to. It’s broken and will be until it’s fixed. It sucks, but that’s the way it is.

PS – Apple’s phone system said (and I heard this countless times in the hour I waited) hold time is estimated at 5 minutes or longer. My wait was 1 hour and 15 minutes and I suggested they update the time expectation.

Technorati Tags:
Marketing, iPhone, AT&T, Apple, broken

10 hours after attempting to activate later…. I have no phone. My iPhone is waiting and my previous SIM is dead. The iPhone is useless without activation – no iPod, or any other features period.

I was in the middle of shooting an uboxing video but that clearly is far from time relevant now given the delay. At this point I’d simply like to have some form of phone service via an active SIM.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, AT&T, Apple

While we were led to believe otherwise this Brinks Security truck really did deliver the iPhones today.

I arrived at the Brewster, NY AT&T store around noon and found myself number 9 in line. I quickly moved to 8, when one potential customer discovered he was not eligible based on something (I honestly was not paying attention).

The day was painless. People were very friendly and generally just psyched to be there. The crowd was a total cross-section. We had geeks, nerds, jocks Moms, and Dads with kids. There was a good mix of women even, which was surprising, but clearly the iPhone crosses over every personality type.

6 hours later – the doors opened and we went inside to find the AT&T systems completely overrun with traffic. The 5 employes at the store were very friendly and doing what they could but it was just too much traffic at once apparently. After about 45 minutes I was able to leave with my 8GB (one per customer) iPhone in hand!

My iPhone is still sitting in it’s box and wrapped! I’m sitting in an almost dark room while my daughter falls asleep and then I’ll unbox properly! I did get a chance to play with a unit in the store and the hardware feels amazing in your hand. It’s quite solid and surprisingly smaller than anticipated which is great. Much more to follow…

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, AT&T, Apple

I’ll be heading to an ATT store in Northern Westchester thinking I’ll beat the potential crowds at the White Plains Apple Mall Store. What’s your plan?

Don’t expect much here today until later, but here are a few notes from today’s papers:

From USA Today

Q: What about corporate e-mail? I understand that’s an issue for many consumers, who may not be able to hook up to their company networks?

Jobs: You’ll be hearing more about this in the coming weeks. We have some pilots going with companies with names you’ll recognize. This won’t be a big issue. [USA Today]

And the Wall Street Journal

WSJ: What do you both envision being added over time to the iPhone, in terms of access to ringtones through Cingular’s (now rebranded AT&T) platform and maybe through some other manner, like turning your iTunes songs into ringtones?

Mr. Jobs: As you may know, iTunes is now the number three distributor of music in the U.S., ahead of Amazon and Target and behind Best Buy and Wal-Mart, and obviously the largest online distributor of music in the world. Of course, you can play that music now on your iPhone. One might imagine a lot of things down the road.

WSJ: Is one of those things offering music purchases and video purchases directly from the phone?

Mr. Jobs: There’s a lot of things you can imagine down the road.

WSJ: Steve, how are you feeling now about how this device will impact your iPod business? Will it cannibalize iPod sales in any meaningful way?

Mr. Jobs: We can report to you that it hasn’t so far. We announced this in January, and we’ve had a very healthy iPod business since then. This is a more expensive device and one that carries a service requirement with it, unlike any iPod does. I’m not too worried about that, but we’ll certainly report to you what happens as it happens.

WSJ: A lot of attention has been focused in some of the initial reviews of the iPhone on the EDGE network that this phone is going to be on. Steve, we saw somewhere that your concern in putting a 3G chip in the first edition of the iPhone was that the current generation of that technology would drain the battery a lot, and that there were also some issues of coverage of the AT&T 3G network at the time you did this deal. Is that correct and have those issues been resolved over time as we’ve seen the technology evolve?

Mr. Stephenson: If you think about wireless broadband networks, EDGE is the only ubiquitous nationwide broadband network deployed today. It’s a 300-plus kilobit type service. We’re selling in the tens of thousands every single month of smart phones that operate on nothing but EDGE. The service experience is really, really good and what you’re going to see with the iPhone is the caching technology that Steve and the Apple guys have developed here makes the EDGE experience even better. Between the Wi-Fi and the EDGE coverage, this is a really good experience.

We put right south of $16 billion of capital into this network over the last two years. I feel real good about the coverage and the performance. We put tens of thousands of hours of testing this device on this network and it’s performing at the top of any device we have out there.

…

Mr. Jobs: You know every (AT&T) Blackberry gets its mail over EDGE. It turns out EDGE is great for mail, and it works well for maps and a whole bunch of other stuff. Where you wish you had faster speed is…on a Web browser. It’s good enough, but you wish it was a little faster. That’s where sandwiching EDGE with Wi-Fi really makes sense because Wi-Fi is much faster than any 3G network.

What we’ve done with the iPhone is we’ve made it so that it will automatically switch to a known Wi-Fi network whenever it finds it. So you don’t have to go hunting around, resetting the phone, flipping a switch or doing anything. Most of us have Wi-Fi networks around us most of the time at home and at work. There’s often times a Wi-Fi network that you can join whether you’re sitting in a coffee shop or even walking along the street piggybacking on somebody’s home Wi-Fi network. What we found is the combination is working really well.

When we looked at 3G, the chipsets are not quite mature, in the sense that they’re not low-enough power for what we were looking for. They were not integrated enough, so they took up too much physical space. We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I’m sure some of those tradeoffs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision.

WSJ: Can you say whether 3G technology has evolved to the point where you’re already working on including that in the next edition of the iPhone?

Mr. Jobs: No, we just don’t comment on future stuff.[WSJ]