We Have Service

The Apple repair center sent me a new iPhone.

Just to review the sequence of events:

1. Friday evening - I bought a new iPhone, activated it and it worked.
   
2. Saturday morning - The "No Service" message appeared. I spent several hours hobnobbing with the intelligentsia working the support lines at Apple and AT&T.
3. Saturday afternoon - Returned to the AT&T store for a new SIM card.
4. Saturday evening - Support call to Apple. I was assigned a repair order number.
5. Tuesday morning - Received a temporary replacement iPhone
6. Wednesday morning - Fed Ex'ed my original iPhone back to Apple
7. Friday morning - Received a new iPhone from the Repair Center (It has a different serial number now)

I am impressed again. The new iPhone works but I am going to hang on to the replacement through the weekend just in case there is another failure.

Before taking the SIM card out of the temporary iPhone I sync'ed it with iTunes one last time. When I connected the new iPhone, iTunes offered to restore my settings from backup. Except for the pictures in the Camera Roll, the wireless connection passwords and my email account password, everything seems to be in order, even down to weather forecasts for the 6 different cities I watch.

Congratulations, Apple. My iPhone works.

Be Honest with me Doc. Is it bad?

This is a copy of the email generated when Apple noticed that my iPhone had arrived for repair. My status is currently "Diagnosing Product."

AppleCare Dear Misahl, Repair ID: D####### Your IPHONE reached our repair center on 2007-08-30. We will notify you by email when the repair is complete. Visit Repair Staus to view the current details of your service request. Regards, The AppleCare Team

Rescue 611

Tuesday morning my temporary replacement iPhone arrived and it worked.

I'm impressed. After seeing the email notification late Monday evening that the package had been shipped I didn't expect to receive it until Wednesday. Yet Tuesday morning there it was. The replacement phone arrived in a small, sturdy returnable box which also contained an official SIM extraction device - a small paper clip.

Being an old hand at it now, I confidently slipped in the second SIM card. Lo and behold, I had service with a good strong signal. Congratulations, Apple. :-)

Previously I had thought it was more likely to be something in the AT&T network and the replacement iPhone would have the same problem as the original. I am glad to be wrong. I do recall in the previous call the Apple technician mentioning "a rare problem but there could a failure in the iPhone's SIM card reader."

The next hurdle was to get my old cell phone number assigned to the new SIM card. First I found out what sort of things would be required. It boils down to knowing or being the person authorized to permit the change, and knowing the billing account number, billing address and the amount of the last bill. With all that in hand, I did a little more searching and found out about 611, a toll free call for AT&T wireless service, aka 800-331-0500.

The first time after navigating the usual voice menu 611 dropped my call but the second time I got to a live person who routed my call to the "porting department." I explained to a patient, helpful lady my situation and within about 20 minutes she had everything needed for the transfer. I knew the change had taken effect about three hours later - someone from work called me and my iPhone rang instead of my old phone. Success!

Now all I have to do is return the first iPhone but that's going to be easy. They thoughtfully provided neat little strips of tape to seal the returnable container. (But I did write down the tracking number just in case something goes awry after dropping it off in Fed-Ex box. For some reason, I'm not feeling all that lucky right now) More later.

Postscript: Got a follow up call from AT&T tech support. They said they just wanted to check up on me and see if I finally got connected. Now I am really impressed.