TAG | The iPhone is back in business |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 06 August 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 After considerable work and frustration I got the message down pat. If you want to make an iPhone work with an existing SIM just put the card in, call 1800 IPHONE and straight away ask for Level 2 support.Why this has been so difficult for all but the very first call to 1800 IPHONE I cannot fathom. Are the people who answer not prepared in any way? Indeed, have they even held an iPhone themselves? What I was asking was not some highly obscure feature or setting but a foundational element. Anyone taking an iPhone out of the box and putting in an existing SIM card would face this exact same quandary. Interestingly, we did have one iPhone we wished to reallocate. We figured we could delete the settings but it seemed like a superior idea to use the built-in reset option to take the device back to its initial configuration. At this point I had forgotten the comment that some pre-activation was happening in the bowels of Telstra. After taking an astounding two hours to reset itself the iPhone powered back on and duly prompted for iTunes. It would allow an emergency call to be made but nothing more without feeding its iTunes hunger. There was nothing complex to do here; we just plugged it in to a computer running iTunes and it configured itself, taking us right back to where we were when the phone first arrived, open, from Telstra. Perhaps those wishing to use iPhones on different networks need only perform the built in reset? So, after all this effort, what’s the iPhone like to use? In a nutshell, the interface is brilliant. The design is aesthetic but the speaker seems to lie right under the palm of my hand holding the phone. There are many nice features and the available apps add a rich deal of functionality and entertainment. The font used for e-mail is crisp and clean and the touch keypad is growing on me. However, despite this, the BlackBerry still leaves it miles behind. You can’t delete mail on an iPhone without deleting it from the server. You can’t search your e-mail, but only scroll through it. It won’t display most attachments including, surprisingly, images. Nevertheless, I did it. I achieved my goal of getting an iPhone and using it with my existing corporate voice plan. It took Telstra a while to come to the party and by goodness the people at 1800 IPHONE need some training but it’s done, and it works.
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