My Brand New iBrick

I'd love to be able to tell all of you how fantastically revolutionary and life changing my new iPhone is; but after 34 hours, the darn thing still doesn't work—it' s in activation Purgatory with my dear friends at AT&T.

After purchasing my phone Friday night, doing the geek thing and waiting on line, I received my phone, plugged it in, filled out the necessary paper work through iTunes, and then received a message stating that "Your activation will take additional time to complete." An hour later I received an email stating "Thank you for your purchase. AT&T is now processing your application."

34 hours later, I'm writing this blog. This is after 4 phone calls, and spending a majority of the day reading countless message boards containing 1000s of belligerent and maniacal iPhone purchasers who are experiencing the same thing. People really seem to get ludicrous after the 18th hour, freakishly insane after the 24th hour, and depressed and surrender-y after hour 30, when most people I've read have just decided to return the iPhone from whence it came, despite the $60 restocking fee.

This problem is so rampant that the last time I checked EnGadget, 36.8% of iPhoners polled still did not get the product working, while another 11.7% complained that they had tons of problems but they finally worked it out. That's a whopping 48.5% of people who had serious enough problems to scour the web and find that they are not alone, or even close to alone. Message boards and blogs such as EnGadget, iphonefaq.org, and countless others have been spinning wildly out of control with angry customers posting their customer service nightmares, and posting any new AT&T phone number they can find, including one number that was apparently created solely to deal with people who have passed the 24 hour mark.

But here's the real kicker; most people who are porting their numbers over from other carriers found that they immediately lost service on their existing phones, only to wait in phoneless chaos for hours and hours. Some real estate brokers and salesman were particularly agitated because of their reliance on the phone as their primary source of income. The angry masses have renamed the phone the iBrick, the iWait, the iPaperweight, and all kinds of other colorful pet names.

I'm perplexed with my own situation; I'm neither porting my number NOR transferring an existing AT&T account, so it should be a clean slate experience. Alas, it is not.

Apple's programming of the phone renders it competely useless pre-activation unless you need to make an emergency call; it's music, internet, and email capabilities are all locked out.

AT&T has used backlogs, server problems, and individual applicant problems all as excuses, and according to some blog posts, have even blamed Apple iTunes. Whatever the reason, both Apple and AT&T look bad in this situation, and at the very least we deserve a refunding of the $36 NON-activation fee AT&T is charging. All I can say is that I am iPissed.

UPDATE AS OF 11PM on Sunday Night: I've passed the 48 hour mark, the 7 phone call mark, and I still don't have a working phone. AT&T is now blaming Apple. At this point I don't care who is to blame, I just want a phone. I'm going to get up at 5am and head over to the Apple Store to return the phone. Maybe that will get them to push it through the system.