Sunday, July 15, 2007

iPhone Activation

Since I left Farm Credit for Sutter over nine years ago, I have had 6 personal cell phones, roughly a new one every eighteen months. I use my personal cell phone for a number of things, including posting pictures straight to this weblog. With my Samsung A900 approaching the 18 month mark and getting pretty beat up, I decided to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. [As an aside, I carry a AT&T Blackberry Curve for business use.]

Watching the iPhone inventory levels on-line for the Apple stores, when the Arden Fair store showed they had some in stock, I went down at lunch and picked one up. Given some of the horror stories about getting the iPhone activated and moving an existing number from another vendor, I decided that I would wait until this weekend to sit down and get it activated and set-up.

I was dumbfounded at how easy the activation process went. I connected the iPhone to iTunes and filled in a couple of screens, including the information on my account with Sprint. At one point, I got a screen saying that it was going to take 6 minutes for the next step. I walked away and when I came back the iPhone was activated and my number was transferred from my old phone. I do not think that the whole process took even 10 minutes.

Over the years, I have used software from FutureDial to keep my contacts in Microsoft Outlook and move the contacts from phone to phone. I pointed iTunes at Outlook and it loaded all of the contacts into the iPhone. On my old phone, I had a number of pictures that I used as the wallpaper and that were displayed when people called. I put all of these pictures in a directory, pointed iTunes at the directory and all of the pictures were loaded into the iPhone. It only took me a couple of minutes to attach the pictures to the appropriate contacts. I configured Gmail. I attached the iPhone to our security enabled wireless access point.

In less than 30 minutes, I was off and running with the iPhone.

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