iPhone: Setup
Posted Jun 29, 12:55 AM in Apple by Scott Conley
There are already unboxing details out there, and rich media from Apple on the activation process.
I will not provide much of the detail on the process itself here, except to say that it should be pretty straightforward.
In our case, it was not.
To be fair, I wouldn’t place any of it on iPhone.
(note: I totally dropped the ball on photos over the next two hours, so it’s mainly text. I suck. Hugely.)
Our first issue was the fact that iPhone requires a new iTunes version released this morning. Didn’t know this, so we both had to download it on-the-fly. Over the air. In a highly overcrowded, tech-savvy media frenzy.
So that download took about 30 minutes. Which is 29 minutes longer than it should have. This was especially painful, as we’d granted Ian (the journalist) permission to hang out while we got the phones going. You know, let’s-call-each-other-right-away feedback for the guy’s story.
Geoff’s laptop was choking so badly on the suffocating network load that he actually gave up, but I pressed on.
While the machines were stalling on the big downloads, we were extremely popular with the passerby traffic: posing for photos, letting strangers fondle the hardware and meeting tourists baffled over the whole affair.
Eventually, my box wrapped up, and I jacked iPhone into iTunes and waited for The Magic to happen.
It didn’t. iTunes needs the 10.4.10 security update. Required. Download immediately (70+ Mb). Argggh! This took another 20+ minutes of hair-pulling wait. Fortunately, Ian was gracious enough to reveal his impressions of the Great Descent, and entertained Caryn, Pete and Mingdi, who had all come to support our burdened trip home and of course, to see the spectacle.
By this point, it’s 7pm, I’ve had iPhone for nearly an hour and I still can’t call anyone on it. Geoff’s totally frustrated with the network problems, and we’re all a little snippy with the whole no-sleep, thousands-of-people vibe.
But onward! My laptop reboots, iTunes loads, I plug in the iPhone and… voilá! “Welcome to iPhone!”
The activation process was dead simple. Alas, it was also for me just plain dead. It seems that my phone number suffers from a common ailment
Still not the last straw, I elected to carry on with a plain-vanilla registration, that would yield me a brand new phone number. I was confident that AT&T could transfer my current number over this week, and that a little administrative voice-jail was certainly worth immediate iPhone analysis!
This ultimately failed too, when the shaky LAN could not keep the iTunes client happy during the activation process. Three consecutive network failures would eventually put the death knell on the whole get-it-running-before-leaving plan.
We agreed to meet Ian later this weekend, and promptly hopped a cab to Brooklyn.
Next up: iPhone First Impressions and hopefully by Sunday, a Conley-media roundup. My blog numbers are hilarious and I’d love to share the analytics data with you guys.
Rate this article:
(1 ratings)
Advance Wars DS