Activation fail, forced to go to store to activate

[icebox93]

So I got my Iphones yesterday afternoon, and after extracting everything important from my old phone, I hooked the phone up to an existing itunes installation (updated to 10.1.2). I created the new apple account, signed up for mobile me, and then itunes presents the standard summary page, but with a phone number not my own. And the phone starts complaining that activation failed. There's a "try again" button, and I hit it three or four more times the "fail" box comes up, with no effect. I tried closing itunes and disconnecting the phone a few times, but that just led the phone to sync.

OK, I come to the forum, and see that people have activated with *228. I have done that before with other phones, and was happy to see that worked. But when I tried that, activation failed again. I went to my verizon, as I knew that activation was available from there, but that failed as well.

Frustrated that the simple task of activation was not working, I called tech support. They suggested resetting the phone, which had to do multiple times, as this was taking so long I had to leave the house and take my old phone with me while itunes was slowly downloading the firmware for a reset. The first reset likely failed to activate because the old phone was on the line. But shutting the old phone off and resetting didn't work either, so eventually I had to go to the verizon store for them to activate the phone. It took hours of crap before success. No one at Verizon (tech support or store) has any idea why this happened.

And I've still got my wife's iphone in it's box to activate tonight. Hope that goes better, as the OOBE on the first iphone is the worst one I've had in a long while with any tech product. Total fail on apple & verizon's part.

Has anyone else had to activate at a store?

 

[jdragione]

Wow. Sounds like the rep you spoke to wasn't too bright.

My phone would not activate online or through *228 but a simple phone call to customer care allowed me to read them my MEID and them to activate it.

You wont have a problem going to the store though.

 

[icebox93]

Wow, I actually talked with two people at support, and neither offered to activate over the phone. When I called the first time, the Verizon's phone routing software knew I had been trying to activate and asked if that's why I was calling, I indicated it was, and so I assumed that I was getting someone who had a clue about activation. She didn't suggest the obvious "read me the MEID, I'll do it for you," instead she wanted to make activation through itunes work. Later on, the second guy I talked to listened to the story so far and said to go to the store

I had never had the problem of boneheaded support staff from verizon before; every time I had called them with a problem over 6 years I pretty much got the help I needed without problem. Looks like my number was up.