Finally having heard yet another iPhone podcast yesterday I suddenly got cold feet about the idea of getting an iPhone from eBay. It seemed it would be just too easy to download one iPhone patch too many and turn the thing into a patched to hell and hacked to death ex-iPhone.

Also the final eBay price seems to have gone up about £50 over the weekend as word of mouth does it a whole buncha good. So I got one from O2. I did check that if there was no coverage from my home that I could return it, and it appears to be the case, after some testing. I was considering jumping ship to Vodaphone when my current T-Mobile contract runs out in about 5 months. Now that’s not necessarybut if I want to move my T-Mobile number onto the iPhone I am going to take a hit with the early cancellation.

Buying the iPhone from O2 couldn’t have been easier. Usually with T-Mobile you get a free upgrade phone when you extend a contract and you’re stuck in the shop for 30 minutes while the sales clerk drives through some upgrade processes from hell. With O2, I asked for the iPhone, gave him a credit card and that was it (Did you get you’re credit card back, he-he? Ed). Took about 90 seconds.

Plugged it into a PC USB socket, iTunes started itself and downloaded v7.5 of itself and rebooted. Entered some data, bank details, I was credit checked, given the OK, got the phones number, the phone was activated and it was done. That’s more like it.

The iPhone found the wi-fi connection and I entered the WEP key, it sync’d email, addresses and favorites from IE and not a hitch. For security reasons it didn’t copy over the email passwords so I entered those. Got it to copy over some podcasts and checked a favorites playlist, though that didn’t sync as though the playlist was checked the tracks that made up the playlist weren’t individually checked. Checked them and resync’d and everything was done.

Darned impressive gadget though. Everything you see on the TV adverts work really well. Showed it to a couple of people at work and they definitely got the WOW factor, and we’re not talking anything Windows Vista here.

There are a lot of iPhones auctions on ebay but you have to check the ads very thoroughly or you could get seriously burnt.

Many of the auctions are for O2 phones that are pre-activated, not ot be confused with un-locked, and come with an O2 pay as you go sim card. Well that’s fine in that you aren’t strapped to an 18 month expensive contract, and you’ll even be able to use the phone facility. Heaven knows what happens when you use the web as I’m not sure the pre-pay sims have a data tarrif.

Other auctions are from the US, but apparently there needs to be some further tweaking on the US variety to enable call identification, otherwise you will never get ‘Jessica calling’, just the phoning number being displayed.

This morning I noticed that there are a whole load of German iPhones on the UK eBay pages. No doubt this is since Vodaphone forced T-Mobile Germany to unlock their phones. These unlocked German phones were selling over there for 999 Euros, which is about £700, but they are on eBay for around £250-300. That doesn’t make sense.

Obviously due to the huge demand for the iPhone market forces are responding and offering them, but there are so many issues that could trip me up. Some of the vendors make a big deal about having Youtube installed and working, so no doubt it is possible to buy one without Youtube working.

More stuff to consider.

I keep getting odd things happening with my car, a VW Golf.

This morning the rear wiper refused to work. Also, on the dashboard there are numerous screens that are paged through via a switch on the end of the wiper stalk. The screens display number of miles done all told, since last reset, average speed, amount of gas left etc. I was stuck on the default screen this morning, which shows me which doors are shut, and I couldn’t page away to any of the other screens at all.

A couple of weeks ago I parked up and locked the car with the windows obviously shut. I came back an hour later and the drivers window was open. I also have trouble opening the rear doors with the central locking. Last week, on the way home from work in the dark, the lights suddenly switched themselves off.

Turn up at a garage and tell some grease monkey about all that lot and you’ll get some head scratching. This all reeks of software problems.