My iPhone is officially known as a piece of iCrap! I bought it in mid-May (yes, I know – I paid way too much and it was soon outdated but I needed a phone when I had to relinquish my crackberry along with the pesky day job) and while we were on our trip to the west coast it worked fine – at least as far as I could tell. In fact, I really had no problems with it other than the battery not holding a charge for that long.
Then in July, Apple came out with the new version of iPhone and also a software upgrade for my phone. At son-in-law Steve’s suggestion, I waited several days before doing the download and it appeared it went well – but all of a sudden I sometimes didn’t get my email at all or only got part of it. What’s funny is that Burl’s email came through fine but not mine and they are configured identically. I restored the phone, backed it up, called support several times and even had Steve look at it. Very frustrating but we weren’t traveling and it wasn’t going to kill me to be away from my email for a few hours.
Earlier this week Steve spent over an hour looking at my connections and delving into the bowels of my PC where all the secret stuff is hidden and only the true PC geeks know what it is and what it does. Voila! It looked like we had passed a hurdle and life was good – for almost a day.
So yesterday I once again called my friendly Apple support crew – the tech told me my problem was that I didn’t want to choose “wireless” but instead be on the “Edge” (like I wasn’t, pun intended). Life was good again – I was at home but all my email was going to both my desktop and the iPhone until about 8:00 this morning.
I was gone for a few hours and in that time, received no email on my phone – but when I got home had over a dozen messages. Thus began the support call from hell – all 2 hours and 43 minutes of it! On my third person I got a guy named Robert who hung in there with me and after finally tearing everything down, he had me install it as a new phone and he did something magical with the connections (all the while blaming AT&T for the entire problem!). It’s supposed to check for mail every 15 minutes but looks like I have to ask it to check – but so far I’m getting my mail. Tomorrow may tell another story.
In the meantime, here are some of the myths I’ve been told by Apple:
- You have to always be logged off your home email in order to get email on the iPhone
- You need a POP3 account instead of POP even though my email will only take POP and I have gotten email through POP in the past.
- You can only get your att.net email if you forward it to gmail.com
- Don’t ever put it on Wireless.
- Always put it on Wireless.
- It’s AT&T’s fault.
- And my favorite – if it doesn’t work this time, I’m going to send you a new phone and I’ll try to get you the 3G (wouldn’t you know, it worked that time!)
Oh well, I now have the name and email address of my friend Robert in Apple Support – let’s hope we don’t have to talk tomorrow.
