I eventually got my iPhone activated, yet 2 days later the number hasn’t processed, and ATT won’t accept anything other than a ‘fax’ (yup no sms or email can be sent to a sodding phone company), to get my international plan up and running because I have had less than 3 addresses in the US. Then I had to get a replacement iPhone because the speaker was broken. As Dave Winer would say – Oy!
— And you know what? Despite the fact that ATT continue to behave like the kind of company that has a 200 yard wide dinosaur-extinction-type asteroid thingy headed for it. Its actually worth it, The iPhone is the kind of superior intelligence that can only emerge as the dinosaur’s fade. A truly innovative and disruptive piece of technology. The kind of product that will aid the fall of companies like ATT as iTunes did to the music companies with a tight butted little tango of bait and switch.
As an example, the fact that iChat is missing from the iPhone cannot possibly be an oversight. I suspect its temporary absence is due to Apple wanting chat to be treated as a standard data service like on the Sidekick, and ATT wanting it to be treated as an SMS message (or more accurately and scandalously for each individual sentence of an IM message to be treated as a separate SMS message) like on the Blackberry. Clearly the latter case is both stupid and greedy, and pushing to hard against natural changes in an industry is not a good idea, if the music industry is any precedent to learn from.
If this is the real reason for no iChat on iPhone, (and I’d love someone to confirm this), then telcos fighting for 10c a sentence IM will only increase the provocation of the computer co’s and make a battle for 0c mobile Internet calls, more likely and worth fighting for.