Well things aren’t just peachy with the whole 3G iPhone retail release. We have lines, we have stocks that might finish, and we have server failure.
At least that’s what happened earlier on with the iTunes servers. That means no activation for 3G iPhone late afternoon buyers.

Remember how AT&T insisted on in-store activation of the new handsets? Well lots of buyers were sent home from both Apple and AT&T stores and they were told to try and activate them later on from the iTunes sites. So much for in-store activation. And apparently Apple didn’t consider anything in their iPhone campaign. They managed to market the handset very well, with lots of publicity around. They managed to deliver the iPhones in time for the retail release, but they didn’t manage to control their own servers.

It was thought that those buyers unable to activate the phone will be stuck with two unusable handsets since upgrading to the 3G iPhone means disabling your previous SIM. Well apparently the second SIM worked on the first iPhone so at least you still have a cell phone to use until you’re going to activate your second generation iPhone.

Apple has been working on those servers and although the iTunes went down, they have been restored after a couple of hours and 3G iPhone customers are said to be able to activate their new phones or update OS to version 2.0. (Oh yeah, updates to 2.0 were not available too as servers were down)