Life and Leisure. Tech and Toys.

I waited outside of the closest AT&T store in my area from 5am until the 8am opening on Friday July 11th. The wait wasn’t all that bad since me and my friends were only about 10th in line and pretty sure we’d have iPhones by the end of the day. Sitting and waiting on the cold hard concrete only made my anticipation grow. I originally never wanted to get an iPhone when it first came out. Something about the price and the 3g speed caught me this second time around.

Since I’m already an AT&T customer I simply had to add the $30 unlimited data feature to my current $45 plan. However I also had to pay an addition $18 for the phone upgrade. Another one of those hidden fees.

The store opening was a little anticlimactic since the Apple activation server was buried under the immense traffic. The activation and checkout of each customer took about 20mins per person. The AT&T representatives resorted to half activating the iPhones which sped things up a little bit. Resulting in the iPhone being unlocked but unusable until activated on iTunes. By the time I checked out some of the people who were ahead of me in line were still in the store.

After leaving the store around 8:45am we rushed home to activate our phones. Sadly, the server was still too busy to activate any iPhones and Itunes kept popping up the dreadful “Timed Out” message. So I made myself some breakfast and took a well deserved nap. I woke up a few hours later and the first thing I did was check if Itunes was working. The first time I tried it, it timed out again. I tried one more time for good measure and to my surprise it worked. It brought me to the step by step activation screen where I hurriedly entered my information.

Ding! My iPhone was activated but it still kept complaining that there was no service. With question marks running through my brain I realized that I needed to put my SIM card into the device. Which was strange because my friends didn’t have to do this. I’m guessing my AT&T representative forgot to switch my account to the iPhone SIM card. This would have been really confusing to someone who knew nothing about phones and SIM cards.

After learning my new phone and playing with it for hours we decided to check out how the Apple store was doing. We drove over to the nearest Apple store around 4:30pm and the line was ridiculous. It was rumored to be a 7 hour line. However, they did have refreshments from Starbucks. I bypassed the line and picked up a static cling screen protector. When I applied the screen protector I found out that the screen dimensions were a tiny bit different from the original iPhone. The screen protector left about a millimeter uncovered on every side. Once I get a case for my phone I won’t have to worry about it. I’m planning on getting one of these incase sliders.