I stopped by the Cingular store on the way home, intent on upgrading Andrea's phone - the first step in getting my iPhone at the end of the month. The plan was to get her a new phone, put my SIM card in her old one, sell my Treo on Ebay (before the onslaught of other iPhone-owner-wannabes do the same on June 29th), and use her old phone in the mean time.

I had lots of questions about upgrading, how upgrading to the iPhone would work, how many they expected to get, would it be better for me to go to them or to the Apple Store to get one, etc. Sufficed to say, they had very few answers. In fact, I think they knew about as much as me about the iPhone. Cingular corporate & Apple are still being pretty silent about details at this point.

The one bad news - my phone most likely won't be available for an upgrade until October :-( The good news - with some fancy swapping around, I can still make it work. See if you can follow along (I can't guarantee that I understand it completely)...

• Cell phone plans are tied to cell phone numbers - Andrea's number is available to extend for 2 more years & upgrade the phone, mine is not
• Cell phone numbers are tied to SIM cards, not the phones themselves
• Cingular requires a trade in phone or charges you $20 to upgrade/switch phones
• Any old Cingular phone will do - including the two or three 5 or 6 year old models with dead batteries that are in the kids toy chests (that they use for pretending)
• I can bring the old, dead phone in & keep Andrea's phone & not have to pay the $20
• In exchange for the 'play' phone, they will happily extend Andrea's cell phone # contract by 2 years & give us a free upgrade - including to an iPhone on the 29th
• I take my SIM card out of my Treo & put it in our brand spankin' new iPhone - it becomes my new phone & uses my cell #
• We take the new SIM card that comes with the iPhone (which, because of the upgrade, is tied to Andrea's cell #) and put it in Andrea's current phone (the one we kept because of the 'play' phone trade-in
• Andrea uses her phone just like she's doing now & I get a new iPhone tied to my #
• I sell my Treo 650 to help cover the cost of the iPhone ($150-$175 to anyone who is interested)
• In October, we bring in another 'play' phone & get a new 'upgrade' phone (& two year contract extension) on my phone number.
• We take the new SIM card out of the 'upgrade' phone & put it in my iPhone - I continue to use it with my # as usual
• We take Andrea's SIM card out of her phone & put it in the new 'upgrade' phone - she gets a new phone

Clear as mud? :-)