I stopped by the AT&T store on my home this afternoon to order an iPhone. Rather than sacrificing the great weather this weekend standing in line, I decided to simply order the phone. It should arrive in about 5-7 business days — much more civilized.

Two details to be aware of:

1. The advertised prices — $199 and $299 — are with a new 2-year contract. If you’re already under contract, you’ll have to pay the full price of $399 or $499 to get your hands on the new 8 GB or 16 GB iPhones, respectively.
2. If you’re planning on syncing your new iPhone with your Exchange Server (e.g. with Small Business Server 2003) using the much-anticipated support for Exchange ActiveSync, you’ll need to pay an extra $15/month for AT&T’s “iPhone For Business” data plan. Apparently, AT&T is actively blocking Exchange ActiveSync traffic on the consumer data plan that only costs $30/month.

I find this last fact rather unfortunate, as one of the great things about the iPhone has been the lower cost of data access that folks have enjoyed since it came out. We find that adding a data plan to a typical calling plan usually adds around $50/month. With the iPhone this was closer to $30/month. The business iPhone data plan will add about $45/month to the cost of the calling plan.

More details to come.

Update: I’ve been told by a few folks that, in fact, you can use Exchange ActiveSync with the regular Data Plan for iPhone, which adds $30 to the month service cost, rather than having to purchase and pay for the Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone, which adds $45 to the monthly cost. I’m glad, and not entirely surprised, to find out that the information I received in the store wasn’t correct.

Posted by Brad Benner in Technology on 11 July 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.