Updated: iPhone 3G Goes On Sale, Plagued By Activation Problems
The phone may be quicker, but the wait sure is a drag. After New Zealand and Japan got there first, after Europeans queued up, one year after iPhone 1.0 hit… North Americans have finally got their hands on the 3G version of the device that, perhaps, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) should have released in the first place.
But many who have walked away from Apple and AT&T (NYSE: T) stores with the new handset have found themselves unable to activate it on the network. Even those trying to activate inside the Apple Store weren’t spared what appears to be yet another system overload.
Fans turned out as expected to queue this morning as stores opened at 8am, but many of the east coast faithful were first to report long waits for activation, with some saying the iTunes activation server was down globally. The problem did not affect everybody, but some O2 UK customers were told this morning they faced a wait of several hours before the problem eased, with priority given to new sign-ups rather than upgrade customers. What’s more, O2’s web-based activation system required Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer, of all things.
Tricia adds: My fearless colleague Matt Kapko is out on the streets of Long Beach, reporting live from the lines. He said that people streaming out of an AT&T store are also reporting activation problems. Ryan Devitt, 20, who had people holding his spot in line since 3 a.m., said the systems aren’t working and was told to go home and activate the new iPhone 3G on iTunes. In addition, here’s a live stream of Tweets from New York, where Eric Zeman from PhoneScoop is detailing the activation outages, the most recent being a few minutes ago.
UPDATE: If you bought a new iPhone 3G today, there’s still a pretty good chance that it is not working yet. Plus, a lot of users with the old iPhones may be experiencing problems if they tried tried to update to the 2.0 software this morning, reports VentureBeat. This had lead to a lot of bricked, or broken devices. If you want all the details on how and when this happened, VentureBeat has a video diary of the events of the day in a post entitled: “iFail 3G: Inside the iPhone launch failure with videos.”
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Posted In: Gadgets, Technologies / Formats, 3G, Companies, Apple, AT&T, iphone
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Comments (1)
Jul 11, 2008 12:41 PM
So yeah I was one of the idiots who stood on line this morning. Went to the local AT&T;store figuring I’d dip in (around 6:45 AM), take a picture, and laugh at all the people waiting. Was surprised to see only about 20 people on line…so I hopped on line…5 hours later, I finally walked out with my phone. However now, around 6 hours later, I still have yet to be able to activate it. Apple, normally so steadfast and sure, really bit the pooch on this one: having store activation was such a poor idea…I mean, seriously, every AT&T;store on the east coast, and every apple store, all trying to activate phones at the same time…PLUS all the international traffic that I’m sure is still going strong…
Dumb move, end of story.
So on top of all that, my iphone v1 is now un-usuable as a phone, since of course it was deactivated as part of the 3g activation process.
Dumb dumb dumb.