Kiss My Life Goodbye

30/06/07 20:46

This morning I woke up to the same error messages as before. After about 12 hours no change. I just couldn't quite face another round of customer service hell -- so I opted for one more pass through the activation setup. Everything was exactly the same right up until the last screen. I changed nothing, but this time it just said to wait. Good news? Bad news? It was hard to tell. But when things are bleak, different has a good chance of being better.
After about 3 hours there was still no change. But then while out and about with my Sidekick I got an email message from Apple welcoming me to the iPhone. Now, "please wait" was pretty ambiguous, but "Welcome" is definitely a good thing.
Sure enough when I arrived home all was well. From start to finish it was about 15 hours of waiting. WAY to long in my book. But that's behind me now and I the iPhone is so completely great that I've all but forgotten the pain. No, I'm serious, it's that good. If you were on the fence, get off, go to the Apple Store and pay the cash, wait the 15 hours, it's totally worth it.

The "keyboard is hard to use" nay-sayers are clueless. I think it's better than my sidekick and the sidekick wasn't half bad. The auto-correction thing is freaky cool and very awesome. I gave up on the one finger typing after about 15 minutes and went straight to thumbs. Works great.

Everything else is really just the same features that I had on my sidekick -- except how you would imagine them to be if you were dreaming. Instead of pictures looking pixelated and weird they're big and sharp. Instead of some weird Sidekick software to load music, it's an iPod. Instead of a weird web browser, I actually have something useful.

When I got email on my sidekick it used some half-assed attempt at IMAP protocol. Sort of pulling the info down, but not really behaving like a real IMAP client. The iPhone is just like the real deal. I can now get email EVERYWHERE -- and respond. I will never have any sort of life ever again.

Of course I haven't tried everything, but I'm finding even the cliche stuff like YouTube pretty damn addicting. Oh and shockingly the EDGE speed seems about 2x faster than it did on my Sidekick. Why? I don't know why, but I sure am glad. It's actually quite usable.

So run on out and get yourself one. You'll be happy you did.

Meet the iBrick

30/06/07 02:53

Had To Have It
So tonight after reading about the many wonderous things people were doing with their snazzy new iPhones I finally break down and figure it's only a matter of time, so either buy it now or buy it later. I called the Apple Store over in San Jose. They're open until midnight, have stock on hand, and no line. I was a little surprised to find myself getting in the car at about 10pm driving the 45 minutes over to San Jose.
The Apple Store experience was a bit surreal, but fun as usual. Because the store was staffed for mayhem and the mayhem had clearly come and gone, the employees had formed a sort of greeting line and would let out a huge cheer whenever a new person came in asking for an iPhone or someone left with an iPhone bag. Since one of those two things was always happening it was a sort of black-shirted cheering gone mad festival experience. Demented and sad, but cheerful.
But I was in and out in less time that it takes me to buy a laté at Starbucks. It was exactly what I expected from Apple. Perfect.

Bad Coder, No Credit
The perfection ended when I got home. I knew that I'd need to activate the phone somehow, but I really didn't know what I was in for. It started out like I expected: Plug in, lauch iTunes, detect phone, start activation. Cool.

After entering in a few choice snippets of info I was shown the screen to the right. Basically they had denied my credit. Those that follow along with my Twitterings know that I've recently been very stressed about buying a house. As recently as 3 days ago I was approved for a loan of more than 3/4 of a million dollars. Yes, houses are kind of expensive here in California. Needless to say, my credit is pretty damn great.

I'm An Engineer, I Can Fix It
I spent the next couple hours trying to change various parameters -- billing/shipping addresses, iTunes account info, credit cards, etc. The behavior never changed. My device remains stuck in deactivated mode. An 8GB, multitouch, phone, ipod, and revolutionary internet device reduced to a shiny little flat thing with no function at all.
So I starting doing a little web browsing and it turns out I'm not the only one. I spent about an hour trying to find a customer service number. Nothing I tried ever got me anything more than a polite "call back on Monday" when our office is open. In desperation I posted to the AT&T forum asking how to get hold of a human.

Not Happy
Some other iBrick owner gave me the magic direct line: 1-877-419-4500
But I might as well have called a small shack in the middle of some other country (oh, wait, I think that's what actually happened) because they were absolutely powerless to do anything but say sorry and tell me to go to an AT&T location to get this fixed.
I eventually was escalated to Monica Schaar, a very patient person considering my tone of voice by this time. Monica was full of choice quotes like (paraphrased), "the systems are overloaded. We just didn't expect everyone all on one day." AT&T execs must watch different TV shows because even with just the couple shows a week that I do watch I was palpably aware that the 29th was going to be a very big deal. The Apple commercials made it crystal clear.

An Ice-Cube's Chance In Hell
In the end Monica could not do anything for me. She did agree to call me back personally on Monday. I'm guessing the odds of that happening are pretty slim, but you never know. Tomorrow I will brave the AT&T store, I'll let you know how it goes.