My Life…

So I’ve had my iPhone for about 2 weeks now and I can’t really complain about it. Although there are problems with Apple’s MobileMe service and I had a rough start with getting Rogers to get data properly blocked on my iPhone, I didn’t find it as much a problem as I found it an inconvenience.

My main grudge against the iPhone was that although I didn’t have Visual Voicemail service (or any voicemail service for that matter), I still got the red dot on top of the ‘Phone’ icon… the red dot usually only appears onto of the ‘Phone’ icon when you’ve either missed a call or have a new voicemail in your inbox, whereby a number in the circle indicates how many missed calls/voicemails you have. Yet, although I’m not subscribed to any voicemail service at all, the voicemail dot was ALWAYS there and there didn’t seem to be any way to get it to disappear…

Earlier this afternoon I called Rogers iPhone tech support about the issue and the support agent said he had never heard about the issue, but would look into it for me and told me to wait while he did so… When he came back he told to hard reset my iPhone but I explained that I had done that already, then I mentioned that the only time I’ve ever seen the dot go away was when I turned the phone on with the SIM card that it came with in it. The tech support agent then proceeded to tell me that I was supposed to be using the SIM card that came in the phone as it’s a newer/more powerful version (4000 series) SIM card and that the iPhone requires its power, using my older (3040 series) SIM card might even damage my iPhone in the long run (eh… I doubt it would be that serious…). He told me that I should put the 4000 series SIM card in the iPhone and he would activate it and it should all be normal, with the red dot gone!!! So I did what I was told and the red dot is GONE!!!

P.S. You can check your Rogers SIM card version by looking at the serial number of the card. For a 3040 series, you’ll see 3040 in the middle (3rd) row of the SIM serial number. For a 4000 series, you’ll see 4000 ass the 9^th through 12^th digits of the serial number.

P.P.S. The SIM card serial number is located on the back side (the side with the Rogers contact numbers on it) of your SIM card in gold. My 4000 series SIM card also happens to have UICC written on the front side.

So I finally got an iPhone 3G (16GB – White) yesterday, even though Rogers said it would about 7-10 business days for it to arrive. Anyways, since I just got it I’m still learning how to type on it. Of really is harder than seems, even as I type this I’m relying on the spellscheck function to correct me… Anyways, this is to be considered my first blog post from the iPhone.

[edit (August 01, 2008 @ 21:13): So I had my data connection blocked for my iPhone cause I wasn't sure if I needed it and it seems pointless to shell out $30/month if I don't actually need it. Anyways, I went to check my iPhone's 'usage' menu where it keeps logs of how many minutes and how much bandwidth you've used. To my surprise, the section labelled "Cellular Network Data" which was supposed to stay at ZERO since my data was blocked, was NOT zero. It was indicating that I had both sent and received data from Rogers!!! So I called Rogers and talked to someone from their iPhone technical support and was told that the reason that I was sending and receiving data from the cellular network was because customer service representative who had put the data block on my plan, put a data block for regular phones on my iPhone plan, and the iPhone needed a special data block. So iPhone technical support representative put the right type of block on it and put notes in my file to indicate that I shouldn't be charged for the data that was used because it wasn't my fault. Hopefully it's all fixed now...]

[edit (August 02, 2008 @ 12:28): So this morning I checked my usage menu again, and it seems that the data counts are still moving, which make no sense, since it was supposed to be blocked properly now!!! Guess it's time to call Rogers again.]

[edit (August 02, 2008 @ 14:21): So I just got off the phone with Rogers (seems like I'm spending all my time on the phone with them) and apparently the technical support representative that I talked to yesterday did in fact put on the proper data block, but what he did was block each type of data separately (email, internet, media, etc), and that causes problems in the system apparently. What the support representative that I talked to today did was put on a all-in-one block, hopefully everything's good now!!! BTW, I was credited for the data the I 'used' but wasn't supposed to be able to use.]