iPhone Buying Experience

Here's my review of the iPhone that I picked up at the AT&T Store near my house. BTW, almost all of the AT&T Stores have sold out of their allotment of iPhones so the only place left where you'll find one is at The Apple Store, or on apple.com.

Anyway, the AT&T Store experience was strange. It was a VERY controlled environment. When I got in line, an AT&T rep came up and took my name and assigned me a number (actually they assigned it to me through Christine who got there and held my spot for me). You had to stay in line and wait even though you were assigned a number.

Once 6:00 pm rolled around, they were only letting in as many customers as their were available sales people. This usually meant that customers were being let in one at a time. Once you got inside, there was a staging area where a sales person greeted you and confirmed who you were when they took down your name while waiting in line. This procedure prevented people from jumping the line or have people hold spots for other people. It was a good idea and it worked, especially when there were 3 police officers standing in that staging area. After they confirmed your identity, they asked you some questions that were designed to help the sales rep completing your order to upsell certain products like their DSL service or cable or whatever.

The entire sales process didn't take that long at all. They even ran a quick rudimentary credit check and gave you a pre-authorization number so that the iPhone registration process that you performed online through iTunes wouldn't do the same credit check.

By the time I left, I had waited about 45 minutes in line after they opened the doors at 6:00 and there were about 12 people in line still. An hour or so later, there was no line at all.

The Apple Store experience was different in that the queue control was not as tight as AT&T's as they were letting in 50 people at a time and any of those people could hold spots for anybody else. One of my co-workers got there around the same time Christine got to the AT&T store and we both left with our respective iPhones around the same time.

All in all, it was an alright experience. Sign-up and activation was easy as expected. It's amazing that you can't do this with any other phone or provider.