So less than 2 weeks after I proudly proclaimed my reluctance to upgrade to iPhone 3G (see comments here), I went out and bought an iPhone 3G, the 8GB version.
I certainly didn’t plan this. Just 3 days ago my stand against iPhone 3G was still, as the CEO of my former company liked to put it, “rock solid”. Then 2 days ago my wife told me that a colleague of hers has a friend who wants to buy my old iPhone. Since I didn’t mind the contract and the old iPhone’s non-replaceable battery was already a year old, I quickly crumpled from my original stance and decided to rejoin the dark side.
But to sell my old iPhone I had to remove my number from it first, so I looked around for an iPhone 3G. The two AT&T stores near my home were out of them, so I called up the Apple store on University Ave - my manager just bought an iPhone 3G from there on Monday. The Apple store had them, plenty of them in fact.
But in order to get an iPhone 3G from an Apple store, I must first get my account off the corporate account. I didn’t mind that as I stopped getting corporate discount the moment I activated the original iPhone 11 months ago. Here, however, was the twist to my iPhone 3G story.
By the way, this chain of events started around 6pm on Tuesday (July 22). I called up AT&T to change my account to an individual one, thinking it would be an easy, 5-minute call. Not the case at all. I was told by the AT&T rep that there was a ‘technical glitch’ and that I should call a certain person instead. That ‘certain person’ happened to be the same person from AT&T’s credit fraud department who helped me resolve my AT&T iPhone woes. From the sound of it, she helped me with the case but had forgotten to remove the lock she placed on my account to prevent accidental account closures. Since her answering machine stated that she got off work at 5pm Central time, I was left dangling on Tuesday night.
The next day I called the AT&T fraud department person again. She didn’t pick up, so I left another voice mail. For the next 3 hours I wondered if this was going to be another debacle like the one from last year. Luckily she called me around 12:30pm and told me she had removed the lock on my account. Phew! I then called into AT&T’s normal customer support line, was put on hold, and finally became a normal individual AT&T client.
At approximately 4:20pm Wednesday July 23, 2008, I joined the line outside the Apple store on University Ave in Palo Alto. After 20 minutes in the Sun and another 30 minutes in the shade, I finally got my 8GB iPhone 3G. I will start to pay $30 monthly for the data plan, a $10 increase but minus the 200 SMS.
Today (Thursday July 24) I sold my old iPhone.
