Launch Day Activation Delays

This years launch day was definitely smoother than the previous years mostly due to the availability of pre ordering your iPhone 3GS and activating it at home. The lines were smaller and although people were still fired up it was a bit more subdued. All this being said AT&T was not sparred the little bit of controversy due to what is being called “Activation Delays”. A number of iPhone 3GS customers reported activation delays after they connected to iTunes and went through the activation process and according to a message received during that process “…it could take up to 48 hours to resolve your issue”

To give you some first experience I spent the night of June 18th in San Francisco handing out t-shirts all night. I arrived home at 11 am Friday morning and ironically the UPS man had just dropped off my iPhone 3GS. I was so tired from pulling 36 hours with no sleep I just hit the sack and decided I would activate my new baby when I woke up. So here we are at 5 pm pacific time and ready to get it going. iTunes procedure went smooth but then the home screen said “waiting for activation”. I waited 45 minutes before calling AT&T and they advised me that they were having those issues and would not confirm an activation time. I waited an additional 2 hours and still nothing. I decided to take out the SIM card and re-insert it. BINGO!!!! Activated.

So a minor glitch from AT&T. It would have been nice for AT&T to let us know before activating the new unit so we could decide to activate it later and not be without service for 2-48 hours as they claimed it would take, but all in all not bad considering last years nightmare.

My new baby is activated and time to try out the new features so keep coming back to the site often as I am sure we will uncover all sorts of tips and tricks that haven’t been talked about yet.