Catwoman's Weblog What part of MEOW don't you understand :)

New IPhone....ARRRGGGHHH!!!

On Saturday, I was sitting home watching television when all of a sudden the hubby comes up and says to me, "let's go to the Apple Store and get you an IPhone."

While I've been wanting one since day one, I was ready to wait until after I got back from my Namibia trip, closer to my anniversary. But who am I to look a gift horse, or in this case, a gift hubby in the mouth...

So on Sunday, I traipse down to my local Apple store, after contacting both Verizon and AT&T about early termination fees and if I'd be able to use the phone on my trip, and purchase my very own 8 GB IPhone.

That first night I couldn't do much with it as I needed to set it up and charge it etc and since I was porting my number from my Verizon account, I could make calls but couldn't receive calls until the porting was complete. I have a wireless home network and we couldn't for the life of us get the phone to access it instead of my neighbor's unsecured network. That was day 1.

Day 2 rolls around....I finally get the wifi connected, I also get my Motorola H700 bluetooth headset working with some help from Motorola tech support. With the help of my Sun colleague, I'm able to get my Sun email account up and running. Now to the fun part...I have an sbcglobal.net email account. SBCGLOBAL is owned by AT&T and I usually access it via a browser by going to the Yahoo page. First I tried setting up my sbcglobal account via the preset Y! Mail but that doesn't work since it ends up having an email address with the @yahoo extension. I search the internet and find a hack to that and try again. Now I can read my email and see all of the folders I have on the account (just like I do when I'm accessing the mail via a browser). I'm thinking, cool, I did it....but no!! I compose a short test email and try sending it to my sun email address. The IPhone says that it sent the email as but nothing shows up in the sent box and it never got to my Sun email address (nor back to my sbcglobal account when I cc'd it on a second test). Next I try to set up my sbcglobal account as a POP account using the incoming / outgoing mail server settings. I'm temporarily successful...I can send emails from that account but then I hit another issue...all of my emails are duplicated. I worked on trying to get that account to work yesterday for hours with both AT&T (who didn't really help) and with Apple Tech support (who did a much better job in trying to help) and I'm no further than I was yesterday morning in terms of setting up my sbcglobal email account so I can actually send emails.

And let's not forget the nightmare I could run into in Namibia...I've been seeing on the internet horror stories of folks coming back from international trips and having HUGE bills from AT&T. I signed up for AT&T's World Traveler to save money on my international minutes in France / South Africa and Namibia. But I guess that won't help with the data part. So, as I see from the postings on the internet, I have two options...remove the SIM card and use wifi only (but then I can't use the phone for calls) or try to get in touch with the RIGHT AT&T International Dept rep who can disable EDGE (what the iPhone uses when you are out and about and not tied to a wifi network for data service) properly during my trip (some AT&T reps say it can't be done while others say it can).

Bottom line, once I get the kinks out, I'm sure that this will my best phone ever but until then, it's really driving me crazy!!

WORKAROUND! Not the prettiest one but it will work for now....

While on the phone with yet another Apple Product Specialist, I signed up for a FREE YAHOO account and after several password attempts (make sure you use all lowercase letters, no numbers, no special characters...I know it isn't the securest way of creating a password but this hopefully is only temporary!), I finally got the IPhone to validate and recognize it. Then he helped me set up a POP mail account on my Mac Mailer for my sbcglobal.net. Then we created a rule in the Mac Mailer where mails sent to my sbcglobal account would be forwarded to my new free YAHOO account. When I sent a test email from my Sun email account to my sbcglobal account, while it wasn't exactly instantaneous, it did finally get to my Yahoo account and I was able to view it on the IPhone. The last test is sending emails from my YAHOO account. If that doesn't work, I guess I can go back to reading my sbcglobal emails via Safari on the phone.

( Aug 21 2007, 10:54:18 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]