iPhone The Missing Manul- P10 doc

262 Activation, Step by Step Activation means signing up for a plan, turning on the service, and either finding out your new phone number or transferring your old number to the iPhone..

Audiobook Speed If you’ve bought audio books from Audible.com, you

can take advantage of this feature to make the reader speed up a little or slow down a little—without sounding like either a chipmunk or James Earl Jones (Your options are Slower, Normal, and Faster.)

EQ EQ is equalization—the art of fiddling with specific frequencies in

your music to bring out highs, lows, midrange, or whatever, to suit cer-ing list of predesigned EQ “envelopes” designed for different situations: Bass Booster, Hip-Hop, Small Speakers, Spoken Word, Treble Reducer, and

tain types of music and certain musical tastes This screen offers a scroll-•

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so on You can also choose Off, if you want the music to play just the way the record company released it

Volume Limit It’s well established that listening to loud music for a long

time can damage your hearing It’s also well established that parents worry about this phenomenon So all iPods, and the iPhone, include an optional, password-protected maximum-volume control The idea is that

if you give your kid an iPhone (wow, what a generous parent!), you can set a maximum volume level, using the slider on this screen

If you do adjust this slider, you’re also asked for a four-digit password,

to prevent your kid from bypassing your good intentions and dragging the slider right back to maximum (The password isn’t especially hard to bypass.)

Needless to say, the risk of hearing damage exists only when you’re wearing 

iPhone earbuds. Music pumped through the tiny speaker wouldn’t damage a  gnat’s hearing.

Repeat, Shuffle These options work just as they do for music Repeat

makes the slideshow loop endlessly; Shuffle plays the slides in random order

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Setup and Signup 261

Setup and Signup

The iPhone stands out from most cellphones in plenty of ways—no 

buttons, all touch screen, gigabytes of memory. But one of the most radical differences is the way you sign up for your cellular service. it’s not in a phone store with a salesperson breathing down your neck. it’s 

at home on your computer, in iTunes, where you can take all the time you need to read about the plans and choose the one you want

The signup process pretty much explains itself. But it’s worth noting a few twists and turns you’ll meet along the way

all of this, by the way, requires iTunes 7.3 or later. (See page 195 for details 

on getting this software for Mac or Windows.) To get started, put the iPhone into its cradle, and plug that into your computer. iTunes opens automati-cally, ready to begin

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Activation, Step by Step

Activation means signing up for a plan, turning on the service, and either finding out your new phone number or transferring your old number to the iPhone

Until you activate, the iPhone can’t do much of anything It can’t make calls, play music or video, or get on the Internet So no, you can’t buy an iPhone and hope to use it as a fancy iPod: Without an AT&T account, it just won’t work Signing up for AT&T service is required

For that matter, the iPhone is a locked GSM phone, meaning that it works

only with an AT&T account It won’t work with Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, or any other carrier, and you can’t insert the SIM card (page 8) from a non-AT&T phone and expect it to work

Here are the screens you’ll encounter as you click Continue to work your way through the signup process:

Welcome to Your New iPhone Aww, isn’t that nice?

Are You a New or Existing AT&T (Cingular) Wireless Customer? If

you’re already an AT&T or Cingular customer, clicking Replace a phone on

my account with this iPhone lets you transfer your old phone number and calling plan to the iPhone You’ll just have to pay $20 more a month for the iPhone’s unlimited Internet service

Click Add a new line to my existing account if you intend to keep your old phone as a backup, but add the iPhone

If you’re not already with AT&T/Cingular, click Activate one iPhone nowto get your new iPhone signed up To activate more than one iPhone—for example, to get one of AT&T’s family plans and get additional phones for your spouse and kids at a huge discount—click Activate two or more iPhones on an Individual or FamilyTalk plan

Transfer Your Mobile Number? You can bring your old cellphone or

ers can keep dialing your old number—but your iPhone will now ring instead of the old phone

home phone number to your new iPhone All your friends and cowork-•

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If that’s what you want, fi ll in the blanks It usually takes under an hour

for a cellphone number transfer to take place—but it may take several hours During that time, you can make calls on the iPhone, but can’t re-ceive them (At least you didn’t sign up for this service the fi rst weekend that the iPhone was available, when it sometimes took 30 hours for the swamped AT&T computers to process the number transfers!)

off er Rollover Minutes, which is something no other carrier off ers That is,

if you don’t use up all of your monthly minutes this month, the unused ones are automatically added to your allotment for next month, and so on

ends The primary diff erence between the plans, therefore, is the number

All but the cheapest plan also off er unlimited calls on nights and week-of weekday calling minutes you get

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Apple lists the three plans it considers the most mainstream—sort of a Good/Better/Best menu—but there are bigger plans available You can upgrade your allotment of text messages (1,500 a month for $10, for ex-ample) or the number of minutes (click More Minutes) The heavy-talker plans range from $80 a month (1,350 weekday minutes) to $200 (6,000 minutes)

The choice you make here isn’t etched in stone. You can change your plan at any  time. at www.wireless.att.com, you can log in with your iPhone number and make 

up a password. Click My account, and then click Change Rate Plan to view your  options.

All iPhone plans require a two-year commitment and a $36 “activation fee” (ha!)

As you budget for your plan, keep in mind that, as with any cellphone, you’ll also be paying taxes as high as 22 percent, depending on your state Ouch

iTunes Account (Apple ID) If you’ve ever bought anything from Apple

or the iTunes store, then you already have an Apple ID Type your email address and password here If you don’t yet have an Apple ID, you’ll need one to sign up for iPhone service If you click Continue without filling in any blanks here, a series of screens will guide you through the creation of

an iTunes account (Apple ID)

Customer Information for Apple and AT&T This screen might have

been better titled “Miscellaneous.” On it, you input your birthday (to prove that you’re over 18), and you can turn on two checkboxes that land you

on the Apple and AT&T email lists (so you can receive all kinds of exciting new junk mail)

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Billing Information AT&T will send your cellphone bills to the address

you supply

son any cellphone carrier does when you sign up: so it can run a credit check to make sure you’re a worthy credit risk

And why does AT&T ask for your Social Security number? The same rea-If you’re uncomfortable sending your Social Security number over the

Internet, you can also stop in at an AT&T store, provide it to a salesperson there, and return home with a “credit-check code,” which you then plug into this screen The truth is, though, that the Social Security number

is less likely to fall into the wrong hands if you send it over the Internet because iTunes encrypts it to keep it secure You can’t say that about the human AT&T salesperson who types your Social Security number into a computer to generate the check code

Accept iPhone Terms & Conditions; Accept AT&T Service Agreement

iPhone’s phone number will be (if you didn’t transfer your existing num-•

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While you wait for your phone to be activated, it’s not completely useless. You can  still drag playlists from the iTunes Source list directly onto the iPhone’s icon to get  some music onto it.

You still can’t access the iPhone’s onscreen controls, of course—but you can use  the earbud clicker to play, pause, and skip to the next song. Just something to  keep you occupied until the activation is complete.

Once you make it through all the previous steps, you return to the regularly scheduled world of iTunes for two final bits of administrative business:

Set Up Your iPhone Here’s where you get to name your iPhone Your

iPhone’s icon will bear this name each time you sync You can always change it later in iTunes by double-clicking the same icon

You also get your fi rst (but not last) opportunity to turn off the automatic syncing feature that makes loading up your iPhone so eff ortless See page 208 for details

Your iPhone contains diagnostic information

The iPhone keeps inter-sion on this screen, the phone will transmit these logs to Apple—without

nal logs of crashes, restarts, and other glitchiness If you give your permis-any identifying information like your name The idea is that its engineers, when studying the collected, aggregated glitch data from thousands of anonymous people, will be better able to spot trends, debug the thing, and issue a software update that improves stability

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And that’s the ball game You now arrive on the main iTunes screen, with the six iPhone tabs across the top: Music, Podcasts, Videos, and so on Now you can specify what you want copied onto the phone Turn to Chapter 11 for details

Pay-As-You-Go Plans

Most people assume that a two-year AT&T commitment is required, possibly because Apple says, “two-year AT&T commitment required.” That’s not techni-cally true, however

If you enter 999-99-9999 as your Social Security number and click Continue, you’ll fail the credit check And what happens to people who fail the credit check?

They’re offered the chance to sign up for one of AT&T’s GoPhone plans These are prepaid plans, intended for people with poor credit (or a fear of commit-ment) You pay for each month’s service in advance, and it’s very expensive:

$60 a month buys you only 300 minutes, for example

tract You can stop paying at any time without having to pay the usual $175 early-termination fee

But here’s the thing: There’s no two-year commitment, no deposit, no con-In fact, if you remove the SIM card at that point, the Wi-Fi and iPod features

of the iPhone still work If you really want an Internet terminal/iPod that can’t make phone calls, or if you can afford an iPhone but not an AT&T service plan, well, here’s your chance

Clearly, this business about using the iPhone without an aT&T plan is something of 

a loophole—and apple/aT&T may eventually close it. Caveat hacker.

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Troubleshooting and Maintenance

The iPhone is a computer, and you know what that means. Things 

can go wrong. This particular computer, though, is not quite like a Mac, a PC, or a Treo. it’s brand new. it runs a spin-off of the Mac oS 

X operating system, but that doesn’t mean you can troubleshoot it like a Mac. There’s no collected wisdom, no massive list of Web sites filled with troubleshooting tips and anecdotal suggestions. 

until  there  is,  this  chapter  will  have  to  be  your  guide  when  things  go wrong

First Rule: Install the Updates

There’s an old saying that’s more true than ever: “Never buy version 1.0 of anything.”

mers didn’t have time to finish they way they would have liked The iPhone is

The very first version of anything has bugs, glitches, and things the program-no exception

The beauty of this phone, though, is that Apple can send it fixes, patches, and even new features through software updates One day you’ll connect the phone to your computer for charging or syncing, and—bam!—there’ll be a note from iTunes that new iPhone software is available

So the first rule of trouble-free iPhoning is to accept these updates when they’re offered With each new software blob, Apple removes another few dozen tiny glitches

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Reset: Six Degrees of Desperation

The iPhone runs actual programs, and as actual programs, they actually crash Sometimes, the program you’re working in simply vanishes and you find your-self back at the Home screen (That can happen when, for example, Safari encounters some plug-in or data type on a Web page that it doesn’t know how to handle.) Just reopen the program and get on with your life

If the program you’re in just doesn’t seem to be working right—it’s frozen or acting weird, for example—one of the following six resetting techniques usu-ally clears things right up

Proceed down this list in order! Start with the easy ones.

Force-quit the program On an iPhone, you’re never aware that you’re

“launching” and “exiting” programs They’re always just there,nels, when you switch to them But if a program locks up or acts glitchy, you can force it to quit Hold down the Home key for six seconds

like TV chan-The next time you open that program from the Home screen, it should

be back in business

Turn the phone off and on again

Try this one next if it seems some-thing more serious has gone wrong Hold down the Sleep/Wake switch for three seconds When the screen says, “slide to power off,” confirm by swiping The iPhone shuts off completely

Turn it back on by tapping the Sleep/Wake switch

Reset the phone’s hardware And what if the phone is locked up so

badly that you can’t even turn it off? Then you’ll have to shut it off by force To do that, hold the Home button and the Sleep/Wake button for eight seconds, or until the Apple logo appears The phone turns off, all right!

Reset the phone’s settings Relax Resetting doesn’t erase any of your

data—only the phone’s settings From the Home screen, tap SettingsÆGeneralÆResetÆReset All Settings

Erase the whole phone From the Home screen, tap SettingsÆ

GeneralÆResetÆErase All Content and Settings Now this option zaps all

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your stuff—all of it Music, videos, email, all gone Clearly, you’re getting into last resorts here

Restore the phone If none of these steps seem to solve the phone’s

glitchiness, it might be time for the Nuclear Option: Erasing it completely, resetting both hardware and software back to factory-fresh condition

if you’re able to sync the phone with iTunes first, do it! That way, you’ll have a 

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iPhone Doesn’t Show Up in iTunes

If the iPhone’s icon doesn’t appear in the Source list at the left side of the iTunes window, you’ve got yourself a real problem You won’t be able to load

it up with music, videos, or photos, and you won’t be able to sync it with your computer That’s a bad thing

The USB factor Trace the connection from the iPhone, to its cradle, to

the USB cable, to the computer, making sure everything is seated Also, don’t plug the USB cable into a USB jack on your keyboard,and don’t plug it into an unpowered USB hub

The iPhone factor Try turning the phone off and on again Make sure

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Turns out this is a software bug, not a battery bug Your battery is fully charged—it’s just that the status-bar icon never shows the little happy plug Apple fixed this problem in its first iPhone software update

Phone and Internet Problems

What can go wrong with the phone part of the iPhone? Let us count the ways

Can’t make calls First off, do you have enough AT&T cellular signal to

make a call? Check your signal-strength bars Even if you have one or two, flakiness is par for the course Try going outside, standing near a window,

or moving to a major city (Kidding.)

Also, make sure Airplane mode isn’t turned on (page 110) Try calling

somebody else, to make sure the problem isn’t with the number you’re dialing

ning of this chapter

If nothing else works, try the resetting techniques described at the begin-Can’t get on the Internet Remember, the iPhone can get online in two

in your area In any case, one thing’s for sure: If you wait long enough, this message will go away