After my phone was finally activated 5:33am Saturday morning I was able to make and receive calls according the text message. What they didn’t emphasize is that I was actually able to use the iPhone for the first time. Until your service it activated you cannot use the device, period.

Over the next two days I was making receiving calls, using my wifi to surf the internet and youtube, and editing my calendar and contacts. I loaded up 1.8G with music and movies (about 108 songs and 2 movies), which left me with 1.8G free…which for me is more than enough. I will leave the majority of my iTunes library on my 80G iPod.

One issue I ran into, and plagued me throughout the weekend, was the inability to make a second call or receive a second call while already on the line. I placed a call this morning to AT&T support to fix this (since I had a few minutes). My call was promptly answered and as soon as I mentioned “iPhone” I was told that Apple has to handle the support calls. I tried to explain it seemed to be a network issue, but it was clear the rep had heard “iPhone” and glazed over. I was transfered to Apple and had a great conversation about the success of Apple and how exciting the iPhone is, and joked a bit about being transferred to Apple…who has about as much control over my AT&T network issues as I do. I then called AT&T back and this time omitted the reference to the iPhone and hoped I would not be ask about what phone I was using until we were well into the issue. This time the call and the tactics paid off, the competent (more than usual) rep who answered my call immediately identified the issue as an account provisioning problem and fixed it in minutes. It is amazing what an alert and educated rep can do for a company.

So now I can make and receive calls like the text message at 5:33am on Saturday promised me….and it’s only 12:50pm on Monday.