I’ve made my decision:

click to embiggify

WOOHOO!

I wanted to share some of the details that led to my decision to choose an upgrade to the iPhone 3GS over continuing with my Blackberry 8700C.  That will probably be tomorrow’s post, so I’ll start with these details:

Detail Area #1: The fine print

The subject of the message says “Your iPhone reservation.”  The first paragraph of the email starts with “Thanks for reserving your iPhone” and even says I can “come to the store [I] selected anytime on the day of my reservation.”

Upon reading these constant reminders of my reservation, I was filled with a fulfilling sense of fulfillment.  This confirmation of my reservation was there in front of me, in black and white!  I completed my reservation at apple.com (Detail Area #2), tied it to one of the eligible phones on my AT&T contract (Detail Area #3), and got this email a few seconds afterwards.  Nice process.  Clean procedure.  Great result.

I. Am. Reserved.

I even reserved some time with my wife (who I’m taking care of at home while she heals from knee surgery) to make sure I can be gone for a few hours Friday morning and that she’ll be ok without me. 

I know. Saintly.

However, down at the bottom of the email, in small print (and light grey on dark grey instead of black and white), it says:

Pre-authorization does not guarantee iPhone availability at an Apple Retail Store. iPhone is sold on a first-come, first-served basis.

Say whaaah?

The pedantic side of me is noticing that it mentions “pre-authorization”, not “reservation,” so that makes me think “oh well, that disclaimer isn’t for me.”  But it still bothers me a little.

My Apple store opens at 10am, so I plan on getting there early just to be certain I’m seen and I score.

Detail Area #2: Reserving my phone

Right when I decided to go iPhone, a friend I was IM’ing with at the time told me he heard that pre-orders had sold out.

GAH!

Some quick googling confirmed that there was a June 12th cutoff that meant anyone ordering after that date would just get their phone shipped approximately “whenever” and it might be weeks before I got the phone.

Thank goodness I found an article online that dispelled the rumor, explained the June 12th mumbo-jumbo and told me how to increase my chances of pre-ordering.  I called AT&T and the person couldn’t help me (that took 45 minutes btw).  I went to wireless.att.com and they were having problems with the website.  Once I did get online, I couldn’t tie the iPhone to MY number, but I could upgrade one of the other lines on my family plan.  It bothered me to try to do this online, so I skipped that method.

So, I was able to go to the Apple Store online and reserve my phone.  Score one for the whallster.

Detail Area #3: Tying the iPhone to my cell

It took a long call w/AT&T to confirm this, but it did get confirmed.  I have four (4) lines on my AT&T family plan.  Two (2) of them are eligible for upgrades and two (2) aren’t. 

Of course, MY line is one of the ones listed as not eligible, but AT&T allows you to use upgrades for one line and apply it to another.  They just can’t do it online.  So I actually tied the upgrade to my wife’s line and then I’ll have to call AT&T to swap them in their system once I have the iPhone in hand.

However, this probably means some weird service experiences are in my future on Friday when they try to do all this for me while they’re handling Black iFriday for everyone else in the US getting the new phone.  And if service sucks on Friday for AT&T customers, it might as well suck on an iPhone instead of a Blackberry.

My next post will detail some of the deciding factors for choosing the iPhone. 

I’m thinking of just making a graphic that says “It’s better” but since when do I use brevity?