iPhone 3G

I finally upgraded to the iPhone 3G last week.

I’ve been complaining about wanting more capacity in the iPhone since before the iPhone was even released, and now, thanks to an incident involving Kim’s iPhone and some liquid, we needed a new one.  She graciously offered to let me get the new one, probably to stop reduce my complaining...

I went to the local AT&T store to do the upgrade, and the process was painless: I was in & out in 15 minutes, and they didn’t have to touch my old iPhone at all.

The new iPhone cost half as much as the original & it has twice the capacity, which is nice, and kind of amazing.

The old iPhone automatically switched to saying "No Service" up in the corner, making it effectively an iPod touch: wifi but no cell.  It became Kim’s new phone, an upgrade for her since it’s an 8 GB and hers was the original 4 GB model.

I thought I’d just have to swap the SIM cards to activate the 8GB iPhone with Kim’s account, but when I did that, the phone needed to re-activate via iTunes.  I wasn’t sure if this would create a duplicate account or change her phone number or something like that, so Kim took both iPhones to an AT&T store in Allentown to have them do the transfer.  But they told her it was impossible (!).

The guy at the Pottstown AT&T store was much more knowledgeable and helpful.  It turned out that all we had to do was move her SIM card from one iPhone to the other, then connect it to iTunes, which did go through the activation process, but used all her existing account information and existing phone number.  Actually, come to think of it, we might not have even needed to do the SIM swap; maybe we could have just done a wipe/reset of the 8GB iPhone and thus caused iTunes to enter the activation mode that way?