iPhone 3g…

Did I mention I bought the iPhone 3g yesterday…no, I don’t think I did.

It was a comedy of errors, mostly mine.
Originally I had planned to wait to pick one up. But I had some time yesterday. I’d gone for a haircut and afterwards decided to go to the Kahala Apple Store to check on the line for phones. Surprisingly it wasn’t bad at all so I decided I’d give it try. The folks working kept telling us they had phones. I got very close to the front of the line and then was told that they only had a few 16 GB’s left. Then no black 16 GB’s. Sigh.
They did say that the Ala Moana Apple Store had lots and if we hurried we could get one. I didn’t want to stand in their line, but now I was on a mission.
As it turned out Ala Moana had plenty of phones. In fact it appears that they closed for the evening with plenty of phones as I noticed they were “in the green” on the availability link later that night.
It took about 2.5 hours and I got to meet some nice folks in line so it wasn’t unpleasant. Apple provided plenty of water as it’s not an air conditioned mall and it was a hot day. When it got to be my turn they had my black 16 GB and I was good to go…well almost.
As it turns out if you have an employee discount plan on your AT&T account you need to “turn it off” to be able to activate the new phone. I had to call AT&T and ask them to remove it. I was very lucky in that I got an operator immediately (good going!) and within 15 seconds of hanging up my phone was activated.
Then came paying for it. Here I had another problem. I used my American Express card and it wouldn’t approve the transaction. I had, just that day, activated my new card (sent to replace the old one expiring 7/08). I had no trouble activating it so I assumed everything was hunky-dory.
It didn’t take.
I asked the clerk to try again and it didn’t take. I was thinking that all that waiting was going to be for naught, but I wasn’t quite willing to give up. I pulled out my old phone (the new one was still in the box and wasn’t technically mine yet) to call Amex and discovered I couldn’t. Naturally, it had been deactivated to make way for the new.
Oh no!
The clerk said, “Let me try it one more time.” He did. The transaction was authorized and away I went.
The phone itself isn’t that different. The form is a bit slimmer but overall not much different. The software is the 2.0 version released at the same time, but I’d already upgraded my old iPhone, so it wasn’t technically different from what I’d had all day.
The big differences are the 3G which is faster. While in line I tried a sample phone and my own, older, phone. The 3G clearly won in acccessing the same sites. In addition the GPS seems to work which is nice, but I can’t say I would have gotten phone just for that feature. And finally there is the push features of my MobileMe (old .mac) account. I turned them off. I haven’t figured out how to make it all work together yet and, it seems to me, that it eats up the battery. I’d rather have lots of battery time and not be instantly in sync. Don’t get me wrong, I can still sync the old way (which works just fine) and I do plan on figuring it all out, but for now I’m not going to use it.
In addition the new MobileMe upgrade software which my laptop wanted to install today seems to have made it impossible to sync the laptop. MobileMe will not accept my username and password in my System Preferences MobileMe window, though it does in the web version.
I’m going to have to contact customer support if it keeps up, but it may be a temporary glitch so I’m not going to sweat it.
Overall I’m happy to have the new iPhone 3G, but I can’t say it’s a necessary upgrade from the old unless you, like me, really love shiny new toys. 🙂
Aloha!