So I was all excited to get on here and blog about my new iPhone. (Yes, that means I’m distracted from Whistler tonight. 
)
However, while iTunes activation went pretty quickly and easily - it failed. I’ve since spent well over an hour on the phone with AT&T - despite the fact that my calls were almost immediately answered!
Yes, multiple calls - one (unintentional I hope) hangup by the first lady, who never bothered to call back. The second call lasted about 20 seconds - the girl who picked up couldn’t stop laughing and instead hung up on me. Nice…. The third lady was actually helpful AND professional! However, she still had to sit on hold with her customer service (??!!) for at least another 40+ minutes before finally getting things resolved.
Now I knew up front that porting a number from another carrier, from a zipcode that I no longer live in, would be a little tricky. I thought maybe Apple had polished things up though, since the first activation screen asked for the zipcode of the service area of the phone number along with other porting info. Since I thought I was squared away, I went ahead and entered my actual billing address, and (HERE IS WHERE I MADE MY MISTAKE) did NOT enter a different address for where the phone would be used.
Lesson learned? If you are porting a number from an area code that is not from your zipcode area, be EXTRA careful and follow the detailed instructions you can easily find with a Google search. You DON’T want to end up on the phone with AT&T customer “support”. Oh, and if you don’t really really need / want the iPhone, you might want to consider whether you’re really ready to go with AT&T.
There is no doubt that the device is amazing, easily the best phone (and possibly consumer gadget period) on the market right now. There are some tradeoffs that come with that, certainly some missing things - luckily we can look forward to Apple adding many of those as we go. No, the question is simply whether AT&T will be a tolerable network for two years - and whether Apple and the iPhone will lead them to improve, or just suffer from the relationship. Here’s hoping I don’t regret my choice.
(Stupid, stupid Verizon. Ah, if only you had known what you were missing out on…)
