So, I’m connected up through iTunes, registering my new iPad.  I worked a few years ago for a cellphone company, and as part of our website, we had folks register their phones.  There was always a question of how to get the information we wanted from our customers without annoying them with all of the information we wanted, and how to confirm that the information for key fields like serial number was typed correctly.

iTunes iPad2 registration experience: I typed in my iTunes id (gmail address) and password, and got taken to a screen that had my address, my phone number, and my serial number, all already populated.  For everything but the serial number, those fields were editable.  They had my phone number wrong, but I first corrected it, and then actually deleted it.  Not sure I like that they had a phone number for me.  It WASN’T the phone number I gave the Best Buy guy yesterday, or any mistyped variant of it.  Not sure where they got it.  Slightly weirded out.  Really appreciative on the serial number thing, though: that info was amongst the set of common errors when registering cellphones where folks would fat-finger.

I skipped the set of questions they ask (what I do for a living, how old I am, primary usage purpose, etc)…  It always bugged me when our end-users would skip those questions, but here they’re not listed as required: interested in seeing what Apple does with my “non-compliance”.  Oooh, it does require my phone number – not liking that.  Giving ’em the fake number run-around.   Whoever has number 366-2273, sorry: your number also maps to “FooBard”.

Did set up the ‘Find my iPad’ feature.  I’ll trade potential loss of privacy here (explicitly granted, instead of just likely going on anyway) for the reward of being able to find my lost device.

By the way, impressed that the keyboard on the iPad counts the ‘@’ as part of the alphabet keyboard, rather than the symbol keyboard.  Nice touch.