I, phoneless
It’s been about 16 hours since my Nokia 6822 went dead. I’m phoneless while I wait for my beautiful doorstop to activate.
I started the process at about 8:00 last night. At about 10:00 I was informed “iPhone activation requires additional information.” The problem was my “old AT&T” rate plan was “not compatible with the iPhone.” (It would have been nice of the AT&T provisioning system had determined this before it allowed the activation to proceed.) I called AT&T and was quickly moved to an iPhone plan. (The nice woman answered the phone on the second ring–that’s right, no wait.) There was then some stressful confusion wherein I was instructed to remove the SIM card so I could determine its number, which we later learned was unnecessary given the number is printed on the box. I read her the number and my Nokia died almost immediately, dropping our call.
I don’t have a home phone, so I scrambled and was finally creative enough to remember I had some unused Skype time. I called back on my PowerBook and was assured my activation was in queue. I was told I could take my iPhone with me (unplugged from the cradle) and it would come to life whenever the activation took.
16 hours and two calls later the iPhone is back in the cradle and nothing has happened. AT&T is quoting up to a 48-hour wait for the activation to complete. I told my family I’m unreachable via phone.
So, I waited in line for four hours to pay $600 for a cell phone that has taken 16 hours and counting to activate. I’m not alone in this:
There are plenty more stories on TechMeme and Google News.
It’s funny, as I was preparing to pick up my iPhone I started to feel pretty good about AT&T. They built Visual Voicemail, they’re allowing activation via iTunes (no annoying store wait!), and I have to admit the rate plans seem completely reasonable. How did they miss on this? Were they the only folks in the country who didn’t know how popular this device was going to be? I expected more.
So, I’ll continue to wait and I’ll demand a refund of at least one days’ worth of service. Such is the curse of the early adopter.
Note to Apple: If AT&T can’t activate these things in a timely fashion, at least allow the core functionality to work for a few days before activation is required. It will make life a lot less stressful on everyone, including AT&T.