Apple's new iPhone 3G loses its connection to the Mother Ship;
People in line for long-awaited device in for day, long & weighted
| by Joe Leo, Columnist |
THE REAL 'McCOY': Not even Star Trek's Dr. McCoy could bring the iPhone 3G to life during the snafu that rendered customer's new phones "useless" when activation procedures couldn't be completed. Here, a customer hands her credit card to an Apple Store employee as he scans her new 16GB model in white.
NEWS: 7.15.08-- Apple's new iPhone 3G debuted Friday morning all across the globe, with the first groups entering Apple Stores (and AT&T stores) in the company's local time zone--the Pacific Time Zone--really, the last groups to experience all the fun since the party had already started (and in some cases, finished) in many parts of the world at 8:00a their local time.
The long-awaited iPhone 3G's release was, however, long and weighted plus anything but a fun experience, due to problems unknown to unsuspecting customers at the time.
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Thank goodness the release date of the new Apple iPhone 3G didn't fall on a Friday the 13th. It would have spelled back luck for everyone involved. But after the events that transpired on Friday in regard to the iPhone 3G's launch, both Apple Inc. and AT&T might have wished it was.
"Houston (or Cupertino?)... we have a problem!"
Not even the new 3G technology built-in to the new iPhone could save the day for Apple, or AT&T, as speculation and rumors began to float around. Was it Apple's internal system for processing credit cards and such? Or was it AT&T's system that was down for activations?
The Associated Press has since reported that, according to an AT&T spokesman, it was Apple's iTunes servers (apparently on overload with everyone trying to connect) that caused the problems with non-activations, since iTunes was needed in order to activate the new iPhones.
How's that for poetic injustice? Apple the core cause of their problems on their big day.
The "3G" in the second-generation iPhone is what gives the device its, edge, against the competition so to speak. The original AT&T "EDGE" network of supposedly 3G but closer to 2G speeds is what technically bricked the iPhone and Apple's team-up with the carrier.
Verizon Wireless and Sprint already touch base with 3G technology on their networks, with their devices instinctively connecting to 3G networks on the fly, such as Sprint's nation-wide network of such, recently rolled out over a broader area across the nation compared to AT&T.
The 3G in the new iPhone's name might as well have stood for the three g's of "golly, good lord, and gee whiz!" All three words expressions of grief (there's a fourth!) starting with the letter "g."
From the information we could gather, the difference between last year's iPhone release and this year's was that with the original iPhone, customers could come in, buy the phone, and activate it later. With the iPhone 3G, it had to be activated in-store before customers left.
This explains why the atmosphere of this year's iPhone's release was very different from the hustle and bustle, the commotion, the jam-packed stores, and all the excitement of last year. People clamoring to get their hands on the iPhone, just to see it and play with it, even if they couldn't necessarily buy it.
In fact, this year it was much quieter, less of a commotion (though on the inside-- the same probably couldn't be said of the outside), and pretty, well? Almost... unactivated.
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