iPhone: Unbox, Setup, and...Huh? (with Photos)
Posted 06/30/2007 at 12:38am
| by Roman Loyola

After you plug in the iPhone and fire up iTunes, you need to activate your AT&T account.

iTunes takes you step-by-step through the account activation process. In our example, we're replacing a phone on an existing AT&T account with the iPhone.
If you have an AT&T account, enter your info.

Since we already have a voice plan, we added a data plan for $20.
We then entered our iTunes account info, agreed to the iTunes terms and the AT&T service agreement. We reviewed our account information, and then iTunes said it would take a few minutes to activate our account. Then this screen popped up.
Uh-oh. That doesn't look good.
It's been two hours since we tried to activate the phone, and we haven't heard anything from AT&T. When we called AT&T tech support, we were told that there is a 24-hour activation turnaround. The tech support person asked if I had any error messages. We didn't. She sounded relieved to hear that response. Hopefully, in the morning, the account will be active. UPDATE: The several hours later, the account was activated.
From reports online, it seems that there are quite a few activation problems. Fortunately, the other iPhone we bought activated quickly. Here's our early impressions of the iPhone.