My iphone 3G S journey and review

After taking a pass this time last year to upgrade my first generation iphone to the new 3G, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to upgrade to the 3G S – especially now that my first gen iphone could only keep a standby charge of about 3 hours.

Friday morning after an outdoor business meeting at the Hunt Club, I swung by a Rogers store in the beaches in Toronto. My theory was that a smaller shop won’t be as busy – and therefore more likely to still have one of the new devices.

I asked the sales rep if he had any left as soon as I walked in and he replied that they only had a few left and had to get one from his manager.  He then asked me a few questions – like was I a new customer or an existing one etc… A few minutes later the manager informed me that he was sold out. Hmmmm

After catching up on 83 emails, I headed to the larger Rogers store at Bloor / Royal York.  Within minutes I was in line to buy the new 3G S. The sale rep indicated that some people had spent hours on hold with Rogers to activate the phones and that she could not guarantee that the process would work.

I asked if I could buy the iphone outright (and not be tied to a contract). The sales rep said of course – it’s only $700!

I decided to go through the activation process. Twenty minutes later we were stuck – but not because of volume on the lines but because mysteriously my account did not include the iphone as an option for me to buy in my account.  The irony wasn’t lost on me.

I was instructed to call tech support to sort it out. After 30 minutes on the phone I was informed that my account would be submitted for a tech ticket and that the back office support team (who comes in twice a week) would look into it sometime this week.

Saturday morning I made my third attempt

As it turns out, my girlfriend was also eligible for an upgrade on Rogers.  We marched back to to the same Rogers location and as luck would have it, they had 2 white 16 gig iphones left.

The sales rep was amazing. Friendly, smart, and resourceful.

According to the rep, one person who was waiting for the store to open Friday morning didn’t leave the store until 2:30pm as Rogers had not scaled up enough to handle the volume of iphone requests.

Instead of making us wait on the phone to validate the contract, he took the phone from another rep (who had waited 45 minutes) and just extended that call. After confirming Sasha qualified for an upgrade, he hung up the phone and processed the new contract manually – to again save us time.

We were in & out of the store (including high fives) within 30 minutes. Arun should get employee of the month for how he handled the many variables thrown at him to get the order processed.

Once we were home I popped my SIM card into Sasha’s iphone & connected it to my laptop. Within 5 minutes the iphone was setup exactly as my old one and I was in business.

It was a great birthday present to myself.

28 hours after first popping my SIM card into the new iphone, I had to recharge it. This is a significant improvement over my first generation phone – especially when you factor in the fact that I’ve been downloading apps & test driving all the new features pretty much non-stop for the last day.

The phone overall is fast and the 100+ new features from the 3.0 software makes what was already a great device truly fantastic.

I’m loving the new video recording feature, improved camera (3 mega-pixels) and overall speed of the device. The global device search is very handy as well. I also just discovered the MMS feature – which is neatly integrated with the SMS application.

I’m really happy with the phone so far – and will post a fuller review in about a week.