My iPhone arrived on Monday 2/7, since I’d set my clock for 3AM on Thursday 2/3 and put in my order as soon as possible. I had a meeting Monday evening, but I had a few minutes to activate the phone. Unboxed it, hooked it up to my iMac, and poof, a live iPhone. Synched the apps and headed out. My first call worked, and it didn’t even drop the call 😉 . Came home, set up the apps, logging into all the myriad services and tools. Everything working perfectly. Headed to work today, used the iPhone rather than the iPad for listening to my regular Podcasts. Made several calls throughout the day, with excellent quality and clarity. As a longtime iOS user (iPod Touch and iPad, since May), I was familiar with iOS and the apps, and things worked as expected. The camera(s) are fine and the “feel” of the phone is nice.
There’s only one issue right now, and that’s activation of FaceTime. That’s not working, and I have Googled enough to know it’s not just me. I have an open support case with both Apple and Verizon. I think, based on my reading, that it has to do with the SMS-based initial setup messages and the routing of those messages. I got good support at both companies and they are both escalating to the engineers. I was very impressed with Apple, as their rep first sent me a direct email (to which I responded) and then a followup call. Unheard of in tech support! I’m slightly disappointed, but I’m confident it will eventually get fixed, and I’m just tickled to have an iPhone (on a network where the calls work and it’s a phone 😉 ).
The FaceTime problem appears to be pretty widespread, and looks like it may be an “legacy Alltel” plan issue. See this thread on the Apple site:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2746925&start=45&tstart=0