Early iPhone In-Store Activations Go Smoothly, Later Activations Stall

NEW YORK - No shortage of hopeful iPhone 3G customers here at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island, New York. Not only did the Apple Store here have a healthy line that steadily grew throughout the night, but so too did the mall's AT&T store line.

The big wildcard hovering around today's iPhone launch was how Apple Stores would handle the in-store AT&T cell phone sign-up and activation process. Turns out they did so fairly smoothly in the early hours--at least at this outpost--with brute force and with the help of portable gadgetry. However, about an hour and a half on, customers reported being told the payment system was up and down, and activations stalled--which gels with my colleagues' experience now in San Francisco. Another colleague has already reported on his woes trying to upgrade an iPod Touch. Activation problems have also plagued those in the UK.

Activation Continued

Back to the Long Island experience: This moderate-sized store had nearly 50 staffers dressed in blue shirts; enter the store, and find one such Blue Shirt to help guide you through the buying process. I knew what I wanted, so my experience was fairly quick-and-easy. An Apple Store employee greeted me as soon as I walked in, and quickly started my order. She handled the entire order from her Symbol handheld device; the most time-consuming part was watching her enter data using the Symbol's definitely-not-iPhone-like pop-up keyboard.

Unlike last year, when you could buy multiple phones, and activate them later at home--or sell them to a friend--this time Apple limited the phones to one per person, and you had to sign up for your AT&T service contract on-site at the Apple Store. That was the tricky part--figuring out which rate plan would work best. (Someone two people behind me took a full 40 minutes longer to sort out the rate plan and phone options.)

I don't deny a bit of sticker shock when the data plan and the extra $5 for 200 text messages were added on; that's without even seeing the total monthly cost of the phone once the taxes were factored in. A downer: I didn't get a receipt in-store. I was told the receipt would be e-mailed to you instead.

Within 20 minutes, my credit check was complete, I was set up with a new account, and I had my iPhone 3G in hand. But I wasn't done yet: I had to stop at yet another station to open and plug my my new iPhone 3G into a MacBook Pro, and then go through the process of logging into my iTunes account to activate the phone. Altogether, this process felt superfluous and unnecessary (one Apple staffer said it was to make sure the phone worked before customers left the store, another said they were doing this to minimize the stress on the iTunes servers...that apparently did work. Still, on another level, it was nice to be able to walk out of the store, new phone already in ear.

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