Not so fast, yet

In my last post about my iPhone activation experience, I concluded with:

So, after much fuss and bad feelings, I finally get pretty much what I expected to get in the first place...

I was a bit hasty.

It's now four days later, and still no service on my iPhone. I called AT&T on Tuesday, and found out that the new phone for my wife needed a supervisor's approval, which took two hours on either Saturday or Monday (I'm not clear about that part). Unfortunately, the order processing took only one hour. So, without a supervisor's approval in the system, the order was cancelled. I'll dispense with commenting on the obvious stupidity of that workflow. Anyway, a supervisor's approval was extracted on Tuesday and, hopefully, the new phone will ship today.

Now for the interesting point. Despite the fact that my iPhone isn't activated with AT&T yet, I was able to sync it with iTunes yesterday. That's right, all features working except the phone feature. Seems like there is a mode that others have discovered: iTunes being signaled by AT&T to enable sync is independent of AT&T service and the iPhone takes its cue strictly from iTunes. Besides the obvious abilities to have machines for software test, etc., this indicates that Apple can easily switch service providers.

Topics: iPhone.