Any phone in hand is worth an Iphone in the bush?

It took Iain Gillott 47 hours to activate his iPhone after waiting in the Texas heat Friday afternoon to buy one.

He has been an AT&T Inc./Cingular Wireless customer for 12 years, so he never dreamed there would be any trouble setting up service. But after a day of trying, he learned that his family rate plan wouldn’t accommodate an additional line, and once that problem was solved, he learned AT&T sent Apple Inc. a message to activate, but the Apple servers had timed out.

An online poll at Engadget.com started on Sunday morning recorded by midday today more than 5,300 users who said they were “still dead in the water” and upset about activation delays, while another 1,600 said they were indeed activated after facing problems.

Source: Computer World

After waiting in line for hours at an AT&T store in New York City, Allison Alexy became one of the first consumers to purchase an iPhone. But when she tried to activate her cellular account — without which an iPhone cannot be used — she also became one of the first to run into problems with the device: She couldn’t transfer her Sprint Nextel Corp. cellphone number to AT&T Inc., which has an exclusive multi year contract with Apple Inc. to provide cellphone service for the iPhone.

Apple’s activation software for the iPhone indicated that the phone number wasn’t eligible for transferring but didn’t explain why.

Source: Moneyweb