EclecticGuy

I got my first iPhone when they were released in July of 2007. The experience was extraordinarily pleasant for a cell phone purchase. I walked in to my local Apple Store at the Burlington Mall, there was no line, bought the phone, and left for home in less than 5 minutes. When I got home, I plugged the iPhone in to my iMac and powered it on. iTunes launched and walked me through a quick and painless activation process – I was upgrading from my CrackBerry (which I still have in the bottom of a drawer somewhere, make me an offer!). Wa-la, I was good to go.

Now, compare that to my iPhone 3G experience.

I walked in to my other local Apple Store in the Rockingham Mall where there was a line of 7 people in front of me before the store opened. “No problem” thought I, there should be plenty of phones so it should only take a few minutes.” Boy was I wrong. I timed an average of 20 minutes for each transaction. 4 of them had some sort of activation issue that required calling ATT – myself included. After waiting for 45 minutes, I stepped up to the plate. Got my 3G upgrade for myself and that took 5 minutes. “Cool” I thought. Then it was time to buy an iPhone 3G 8GB for my son and add a new line to my ATT Family Plan. That is where the hassle started. Firstly, the Apple system rejected my line addition so the salesguy had to call ATT. ATT could not locate my record – even with my cell #, billing address and zip code. The lady at ATT could not find my town in MA! I assured her that I lived there with about 10,000 other residents. After 30 minutes, she finally found my record and proceeded to add the line. 20 minutes later, the transaction was complete. The salesguy asked if I wanted him to activate the phones. I asked if I could do it at home, myself, since I had been at the store for 2 hrs and really needed to get back to work. He let me leave the store unactivated.\

At home, I was able to activate the upgrade to my phone with no issues. The new iPhone on the new line was a different story. The voice service activated but the data service did not. I logged in to my ATT Cellular account and saw that the new line was configured with the original iPhone $20 data plan with 200 text messages. I then noticed that my Unlimited Messaging Family Plan was missing from my account. I called ATT. Basically, the activation of the new phone caused a conflict resulting in my messaging plan being canceled! The ATT rep fixed that but could not fix the data issue on the phone. I need to go back to an Apple store or ATT company store to fix that.

Stay tuned…