iPhone 3G launch stories from around the world

AT&T Store in Oxford, Mississippi
on-site report by Matt Saye
of iProng Magazine

I live in a small university town (pop: 12,000 during the school year, about 9,000 during the summer) so when I went to my local AT&T store on July 10 to make sure I was eligible for an upgrade and they told me to get there very early, I laughed. But just to be safe I got there at 6:30 a.m., a full hour and a half before the iPhone went on sale and sure enough there were already 14 people in line ahead of me. By the time 8 o’clock came the line was between 60 and 70, which is considerable for the size of my town.

At this point, if you’re reading this you’ve probably heard about the longer lines and longer waits at both AT&T and Apple Stores, and Oxford, Mississippi was no exception. AT 8 o’clock the AT&T employees let in the first 10 people in line and by 9:10 not a single one had left the store. However, after the initial confusion, during which the store owner came out to apologize for the long waits and explain what was happening, he said they had been on the phone with other stores and worked out some of the issues, and by the time I entered the store around 9:20 that was obvious. While it may have taken over an hour for the first customers to have their phones activated, I left the store around 9:45, not the best wait time, but far better than my predecessors. Part of the reason for speeding up the lines was after purchasing the phones, customers were given the option of taking the phone back to their houses and activating through iTunes there, rather than waiting in the store and clogging up the line. I chose to have mine activated in the store simply because I was there, had already waited this long, and wanted to just have it over and done with. Besides, I didn’t have to go to work until 2 pm, so I could afford the wait.

Once I got home, though, the real frustration kicked in. I had no problem waiting in line for as long as I did; I actually kind of expected it, despite my scoffing at the AT&T employees the day before. However, once I got home, ready to sync my contacts, music, and a few free apps I’d downloaded the night before, I found that I could not add anything at all to the iPhone until it was registered through the iTunes store (a process that is apparently different than the “tethering” the AT&T employees did in-store). Like many (if not all) new iPhone owners that day I was met with constant errors saying iTunes could not connect with the iTunes Store. It was a process of plugging in the iPhone, waiting for it to connect, receiving the error, unplugging and repeating. It was roughly noon by the time I was able to actually connect to the iTunes Store, although to be fair, once I made the initial connection, I was able to breeze through the registration without any more lagging, even when it made more connections to the Store.

After that connection, though I have had nothing but a positive experience. The app store works great (and so do the apps I’ve downloaded). The phone is a dream to use – easy to use, intuitive, and FUN.

So all-in-all my iPhone activation process took roughly 6 hours from arriving at the store to having it fully functional–3 if you don’t count the time spent in line– and the question that my friends have all asked me is: “is it worth it?” Well, let me see, I had fun talking to the people standing in line; I managed to get the 2nd to last black 16GB iPhone in the store; I had a long wait that was expected but a longer one that wasn’t. Oh, and I got an iPhone that I’ve been wanting ever since I saw the initial announcement at the 2007 MacWorld Expo.

So could the Day One process have been better? Yes. Were there flaws that should have been foreseen that were frustrating? Definitely. Was it worth it? Absolutely.