iPhone Phollies

So Mike was sitting in line at Valley Fair on Friday, hanging with a friend who was waiting to get an iPhone. As it turns out, Mike didn't actually want an iPhone (he's more of 2nd gen kinda guy). So I ended up going to the mall after work, where I met up with Mike and Noelle and some friends of Mike's. I basically took his place in line at around 5:15pm. He'd been there since 10. Woz had been there since around 2am. About an hour later, I had two snazzy new iPhones in hand (and an autograph from Woz!) and we headed off to Maggiano's for dinner.

That was the easy part.

Well, for me, anyway. Noelle and I didn't actually try to activate our phones until Saturday night. Her activation was easy-peasy. Took about 3-4 minutes. Mine, well, I got the "Your activation will take additional time to complete." message around 11pm. That night, around 4:30am (according to the mail I got), I was notified that my plan was "incompatible" with the iPhone. I had a TDMA phone, which I am a bit sad to say goodbye to (it gets great reception in the williwacks), but AT&T has been pestering me about the fact that they're dismantling the TDMA network for some time now. Anyway, I called the number I got in the bad news e-mail. They can't help. They take my info and transfer me to the people who need to switch my old plan over to the new plan. The people I get transferred to don't know anything about this and in fact deny that they can switch over my plan. I have to call yet another number, which is only open Mon-Fri. So, on the off chance I can find someone at a physical AT&T store who actually can do something, I take a walk over to a nearby store. There I meet Scott. Scott says he can change over the plan, no problem and doesn't understand why the people on the phone can't. Anyway, that took about 5 minutes and I was on my way. When I get back, though, it's still no go. So I call the store back. Phone tree - no fucking way am I wandering through a phone tree to talk to people at a physical store. So I call the help line. The woman there says my account appears to be switched over (which is probably why the old phone can no longer call out) and it should be a matter of me waiting for activation. She also gives me a number to call if that doesn't happen. Well, twelve hours later it hadn't. Happily, however, I got the "your phone is now activated" e-mail this morning when I got up.

Spiffy phone. I really like the web browsing experience (no flash or java, notwithstanding). The pinch-zoom metaphor seems to work pretty well. I got all my old numbers and addresses and e-mail addresses into my address book this morning, which is now synched to the phone. Now. If I could only figure out how to sync music from different computers. :-p