iPhone Experience and Visual Voicemail Fix

Short rant about the iPhone experience, not the phone and features. With everyone under the spell of the Apple reality-distortion-field, there are some not-so-great things about the greatest phone on the planet.

I picked up my iPhone 3G last night and had the old iPhone switched over to Traci. Here’s a quick comparison of this year’s experience versus last year’s:

iPhone Edge: Walked in, ordered phone at AT&T store. iPhone was delivered to house a week later. I unpacked, activated via iTunes easily and had the phone up and running in 15 minutes.
iPhone 3G: Walked in, ordered phone at AT&T store. iPhone was delivered to AT&T store a week later. I went in to pick it up at 8pm. Activation has to be done in-store with the salesperson fingering up my new phone. Phone is up and running in 45 minutes.
iPhone Edge: Came with nice dock connector
iPhone 3G: No dock connector; doesn’t fit old one.
iPhone Edge: Came with nice polishing cloth
iPhone 3G: Comes with paper-thin cheap polishing cloth
iPhone Edge: Came with power adaptor that used same outlet piece as laptops, but had to be replaced a week later.
iPhone 3G: Came with small adaptor, but outlet prongs don’t retract.

The process for migrating my old iPhone to a new number was pretty painless. Be warned, it takes about an hour to completely wipe the phone.

One issue I did have, and this might save you an hour with tech support: When trying to set-up visual voicemail again on the old phone, the voicemail icon may not do anything when pressed. Here’s how to fix visual voicemail on the iPhone:

Press and hold “1″ on the keypad. This will dial-in for voicemail the old-fashioned way.
Set-up a new voicemail password
Hang-up
Wait a minute or so
Try the visual voicemail icon again
It should now work.

Posted: Sunday, July 20th, 2008 @ 3:54 pm