Congratulation! You are now the proud owner of an overprized communication accessory with a TCO of roughly 1000€ (provided you’ll only use it within the 24 month contract period).
In order to minimize the impact on your generous monthly salary you’ve chosen the smallest option package with only 200MB Internet traffic and 50 minutes of call time. Short messages will set you back another 19 cents each.
This resulted in paying 250€ for your 16GB iPhone upfront and an additional 50€ for some decent quality earphones with iPhone handsfree functionality.
After unpacking you wonder where to put the SIM card since you didn’t find any useful opening or the strange metal object attached to the outside of the manuals cardboard case. Since there was no printed first step manual in the box you searched on your providers website… which also didn’t have any answers. On the Apple iPhone homepage you only found an old tutorial video for the deprecated GPRS model going through the activation process.
Some minutes later you actually discovered a downloadable manual, which explained the first steps and how to insert a SIM into the iPhone. And after restarting the device you where finally ready to start the registration process.
You stroll through the iTunes AppStore and collect some free useful tools like Remote and Barcode, add the free version of twitterific and Flashlight (just in case). You wonder, who’ll pay 19€ for an application that’s also available for free and continue on your quest for making this mobile phone do something useful by connecting it to your personal WLAN.
Your attempt to create a personal ringtone is always replied with the following message
“iTunes could not connect to the iTunes Store. An unknown error occurred (11556).”
…which is odd, because you were just browsing the iTunes Store.
But at least you have a new iPod, in case the old one gives up on you.
