[Scatabrain]

Sprint supposedly allows you to self activate or swap your phone. They have instructions on the site. Also if you order a phone through Apple you can specify what number it is for. When it comes in, it's easy to activate with or without iTunes.

Good right? Wrong.

Both of those fail. For me, every time.

For swapping they walk you through online wiping the phone. But this is only needed in rare circumstances. After you self swap, you will find that the device(s) will not connect to the network.

For activating a new phone it does activate and you may find that you can make calls and even browse the web. But miss texts and not get calls.

FYI: To fix you could go online to Sprint.com and look for the handy chat link on right side of every web page. Wait, it's not their anymore. Login, click More... Then Contact Us. Then scroll down and maybe during biz hours there might be a chat button. The person there is handling multiple people at once and does review each account for issues before giving you the fix. Here is the fix for both the new and swap activations:

- dial ##873283#
- press ok
- wait for complete box. Tap ok.
- dial 888-546-0314

That's it. This is not listed anywhere in the walk through.

If you get an error activating do this:
- turn off other phones especially if they are the phone you are switching from.
- hard reboot the new / swapped phone by holding both power and home button until you see the apple.
- Do the ## activation again.
- If it doesn't work try power cycle and activate one more time after waiting a few minutes.

If all else fails, backup, a factory wipe, reset, restore, ## activate will fix it. I had to do this once recently. They just couldn't get the phones to activate but the wipe cured it.

FYI: I have never been able to swap SIMs on Sprint even between iPhones. If anyone can shed light on that it is appreciated. Perhaps I didn't do the ## activate when trying to swap cards. Not sure.

Cheers.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[kch50428]

Thanks for the tip...