Are you serious?

I just bought a new iPhone 4s. So far, it seems a huge improvement over my old iPhone I've had for about three years. More on that some other time.

I stuck with AT&T as my carrier...not because AT&T rocks my world with their product, just because that's who I've had all along and I could stay grandfathered under their unlimited data plan. I got the phone delivered through the mail yesterday, so all I needed to do was go to AT&T's on-line customer center to deactivate the old phone and activate the new one. It seemed pretty simple, and for the most part, it was...except for one hiccup that almost blew my mind.

Pretty deep into the process, I needed to input something called an ICCID number from the phone's SIM card. What the heck is that? Well, there was a nice link I could click to find out how to get this number. And here is what it said:

That's right, it told me to take off the back cover and remove the battery. Well, I'm not a technogeek, but I was pretty sure that taking off the back cover would completely void my warranty, and taking out the battery (which, incidentally, isn't intended to be replaceable), would risk damaging my phone and making me wish that it was still under warranty. I confirmed all of this to be true with a quick Google search.

Another Google search revealed that I could get this ICCID number simply by going to the settings menu on the phone. Or, if I really did need to see it printed on the SIM card, I could just insert a paper clip into a hole on the side of the phone and the card would pop out. Or, if I really wanted to be lazy, I could just look on the bottom of the box the phone came in and, lo and behold, there was the ICCID number.

So, this raises an interesting question. If there were three really easy ways to get this number, why would AT&T ignore all of those and instead tell you to risk breaking the phone and voiding your warranty all in one clumsy action?

I think there are three possible answers. Either their activation website is run by a complete buffoon, or this is one damned evil company with a diabolical plot to sell new phones and avoid honoring warranties, or Sprint or Verizon has hijacked their site in a corporate espionage maneuver. I'm not sure which of these three is more feasible...they all seem to have merit to me.

The good news is that I got the phone activated without having to bust it open. I just wonder how many people have taken the bait on this. Their one savior is that there are two screws that have to be removed to open the phone up, and these require a really tiny jeweler's screwdriver that most people won't have just lying around. Of course, you could just take a hammer and chisel and crack the back off. I suspect the end result wouldn't be much different. Maybe AT&T should list that as an option.

I believe I can see the future....

Tis the season for projections into the future. What will 2012 bring us?

This seems to be a favorite past-time of a lot of the talking head shows in early January. Prophesies range from how many hurricanes will we have to which celebrities will get divorced to what will the job market do to what features will the iPad 3 contain. It would probably be an interesting exercise to go back once a year and compare predictions versus reality...maybe one of these days when I'm not doing anything else I'll look into that.

What I have done lately is watch a few classic science fiction movies, namely "Blade Runner" and "2001 A Space Odyssey". Like most futuristic sci-fi, both of these movies attempted to see into the future and paint a picture of the world as it would exist many years from now. For Blade Runner, it was 1982 trying to predict Los Angeles in 2019 (I think the Philip K. Dick novel that the movie is based upon goes back to the late 1960s.) "2001 ASO" was made in 1968, and it attempted to picture the world as it would exist in, you guessed it, 2001.

Both movies probably got a few things right, but in most cases they over-estimated the advancements that we humans would make in 30 to 40 years (I'm assuming that 2019 in LA won't look that much different than it does now.)

There are two things that both movies got wrong that caught my attention right away. The first is somewhat whimsical - neither movie anticipated Pan Am going out of business. Both movies featured the airline-turned-spaceline prominently, not realizing that the company wouldn't make it past the early 1990s.

The other misfire is more interesting. Neither movie predicted the invention, much less the proliferation, of cell phone technology. They still envisioned phone booths where you would sit down and have a private conversation. Sure, they spiced it up a bit and made them video phones, but phones were still these huge, clunky machines with buttons in privacy booths. Talk about quaint. Incidentally, 2001 ASO also failed to anticipate the divestiture of AT&T. So, no Sprint or Verizon for those guys.

What I find interesting here is how something that is so completely integrated into everyday life now wasn't even on the radar screen back then. Despite their attempts to paint all the little details of how people would lead their daily lives in the future, from flying cars to rotating space stations to Velcro zero-gravity shoes, they couldn't imagine much change in the ubiquitous telephone with a handset. This was a paradigm that they just could not picture going away.

From this side looking back, it seems an obvious oversight. But that's easy for me to say. It sort of makes you wonder what major shift is just around the corner that will one day be obvious, but for now is all but unimaginable. And it makes me appreciate even more the incredible foresight that the real inventors sometimes have.