My friend Jud scored an 8Gb iPhone for me this evening (thanks again!), and I picked it up a couple hours ago. Finally got it home, unpacked it, wow is it a beautiful piece of hardware. Then I connected it to iTunes and I went through the activation process but got stuck at the last step. AT&T was not able to approve me automatically and said I needed to wait for an email from them for activation to complete.
An hour later, no email, so I try to run the activation process again. This time it tells me my credit was not approved and I need to obtain a pre-approval code from AT&T which can apparently only be had by visiting an AT&T store. Who knows why I got denied, my credit record is spotless.
Major Bummer. Apple’s beautiful out-of-the-box experience has been completely destroyed by useless old Ma Bell. So now I have a beautiful but useless brick. Off to bed, I am too tired to deal with this right now…