Confirming anonymous information from yesterday, Apple has officially announced the introduction of a buy-at-home scheme for the iPhone. The Begin at Home program allows buyers to enter billing information through Apple's website, check eligibility and costs, and then pick a carrier plan. Once billing and eligibility are cleared, people can then travel to an Apple Store and pick up their iPhone.
In the near future, potential iPhone buyers may once again be able to handle some of the activation process at home, according to an anonymous Apple Store worker. The new process would not be a resumption of the one for the first-generation phone, which let users sign up for a new carrier subscription from within iTunes; due to people bypassing this en-masse for the sake of unlocking, Apple has settled on requiring iPhone 3Gs to be activated before leaving a shop. This resulted in massive wait times and activation delays during the initial launch weekend.
Apple's iPhone 3G launch has become a stressful day of failed activations, mirroring activation issues during the original iPhone launch last year, accounts indicate. The 2007 launch saw AT&T servers go down in a flood of activations; this year AT&T says that there has been a global problem with Apple's iTunes servers that prevents phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned. Customers have been told to finish activating their phones at home, but have faced the same problems there, according to Associated Press reports. While both Apple and AT&T are signing up users for AT&T service, neither company is able to complete activation in-store and both are asking customers to finish their activation at home; unfortunately, until the final iTunes activation, the iPhones are not able to make/receive calls.
With the release of the 3G iPhone, Apple has clarified that all units must be activated at the store for them to be sold, taking away nearly a quarter of Synchronoss' business – the company responsible for home iTunes-based iPhone activations. Silicon Alley Insider writes that as the company confirmed the loss of Apple's business in a filing to the SEC, its stock tipped, falling almost 19-percent, as the news lines up with financial expectations given in its first quarter.
