Activation

As you all know, the iPhone needs to be activated through AT&T before it can be used for anything other than emergency calls. I was currently a T-mobile customer. What follows is the steps that it took to get the iPhone up and running.

Step 1: Setup an AT&T Wireless plan – I setup family plan with AT&T with the voice plan that fit my needs
Step 2: Port the numbers – I called the 800 number to port my numbers and immediately got a live human being who spoke English. She was very helpful in porting the numbers over, but was also very conservative in saying when the numbers would transfer over. She told be that it would done with the next day in the afternoon. As soon as I finished the call, I was already able to receive calls on my AT&T account with my old number. Not too shabby.
Step 3: Activate iPhone – As you all know, the iPhone USB driver doesn’t support any 64bit windows machines. So out came the laptop running XP Pro. I had to upgrade my itunes to the newest version and then synced the iPhone. Within a few minutes I was entering my phone number and last four of my social, and choosing a plan. I was talking on my phone, using the AT&T SIM card at this time, and a minute or two after I submitted the activation, my phone died on me. It did take a few more minutes for my iphone to come to life, but overall it was a very pleasant experience without any of the headaches we have heard about.

The fine print. Nothing about it not working in 64bit windows

What, no manual?

In preparation for this, I had watched the 20 minute Apple tutorial on the iPhone. Without a manual for the phone, that video is a must watch since it goes through all the basic features of the phone and how to access them.

I really was up an running quickly with the iPhone, I was making calls, sending text only SMS messages and browsing the internet using my wifi connection.

Making Calls

At the keynote for Macworld, they talked about the phone being the killer app, how everything about this was targeted at making phone calls easier. Well using a phone is already pretty easy the last time I checked. With the iPhone, you don’t have to learn anything new. There is the keypad and a call button, with the call button highlighted in green. That’s simple enough. What is easier on the iPhone, as compared to all other cell phones before, is the integration with the contacts list. I can very quickly set a number that I recently called to the contact list. Placing calls on hold, switching between calls, or conference calling is very easy since the interface places these key buttons in the middle of the screen.

The contact list would be better than on any PDA that I have used, if they had a section for categories. Even in the original Palm OS, you could classify your contacts into groups, such as family or business, which would make scrolling through a long list much easier. Maybe we can hope for a software update on this one.

Visual voicemail is what voicemail should all be like. The ability to see all your messages and play them back with the ability to pause and repeat is quite useful. In the old days I would often have to listen to an entire message a few times just to write down an address or number at the end, with visual voice mail, you can choose to repeat just that one section.