iPhone woes continue

I decided to call O2 yesterday on the chance that they might be able to give me some information on when my iPhone might be activated. The person at the end of the line said that all phones that weren’t activated in-store Friday would definitely be activated by midnight; that they were working through their backlog but everything would be sorted for when I woke up Monday morning.

Monday morning arrived. Guess what?

Another call this morning; they’re now saying this evening sometime. Fingers crossed, but this isn’t a great first impression of a network. I think they’ve concentrated on selling the devices no matter what; ensured they’ve made the initial killing and are then worrying about dealing properly with their new customers.

Lame.

iPhone 3G; the comedown

So, I decided to shell out for one of the new iPhone 3G’s. It’s my birthday soon and I figured I owed it to myself to treat myself; I work hard and life’s been tough recently, so I thought “sod it”.

I didn’t realise it’d be so problematic.

I’ve never owned an iPhone before, but marvelled at my mate Rich’s iPod Touch a few months back, and thought the phone version would be worthwhile. Everything was seemingly going ok; I pre-ordered on monday, got emails and texts on wednesday and thursday that the phone was being delivered, but here I am at 7:25pm friday night still waiting to properly use the thing.

There seems to have been a series of huge cock-ups.

I went to the store I ordered the phone from this morning but my phone wasn’t delivered yet. No biggie, but there were serious queues already in the store and you could tell the staff were already quite stressed. Listening to conversations while waiting, it seemed the staff didn’t exactly know how many phones they had or were expecting that day, and had to tell people in the queue that the safe thing would be to come back another time if they hadn’t pre-ordered the phone.

I booked the day off from work, so went home and started browsing the net for stories on the launch. I then realised that there were others problems. I couldn’t believe it when I read that customers up at the Regent Street Apple Store couldn’t activate their phones as O2 requires Internet Explorer as part of their web-based activation service. In this day and age that’s just shoddy. For a company to have an exclusive contract with Apple here in the UK but build their activation system requiring Internet Explorer (NOT available on a modern Mac without booting Microsoft Windows in some way) is just stupid. Whoever’s responsible high-up within O2 for that should fall on their sword.

Anyway, I kept reading more and more stories of woe throughout the day. What made it worse is that this was largely coupled with articles on how great the new iPhone is and video previews of the app store. How did those reviewers manage to get their phones working without problems?!?

It’s later now on friday night. I’m still getting no joy from the iTunes activation system. I’ll probably switch off and try again tomorrow. My only mobile operator before this was Orange. In my opinion Orange are reliable and mainly professional, if expensive. My initial impressions of O2 aren’t good. I’m hoping once the phone is activated my impression of the company and of the iPhone will improve drastically and it’ll all be worth it.

Here’s until tomorrow then (probably…hopefully). In the meantime, I’m expanding my skillset.