Online sales of 's began Wednesday night, said AT&T spokesman Wes Warnock in an e-mail Thursday. He also explained the new activation procedures the company rolled out at the same time.

"The device ships activated, but a customer must accept terms and conditions over the phone with customer care or online at att.com, which is the same process for other phones purchased online," said Warnock. "After [that] he or she will simply sync the device with to use it."

Since Apple in July -- and at the same time dumped activation via its own iTunes online music store -- AT&T has sold iPhones only at its physical stores and . Even during the weeks after the 3G launch, when supplies were tight and orders backed up, AT&T notified customers that their phone had arrived, but still made them return to a store to pick it up and activate it.

That process resulted in a series of , when in-store activation ground to a halt as the back-end servers collapsed. On July 11, in fact, some buyers were sent home with instructions on how to activate their newly purchased iPhones from home.

The first-generation iPhone, which debuted in June 2007, could be purchased online and activated through iTunes; Apple and AT&T changed that for the new iPhone 3G to stop purchases of the device without a corresponding contract with AT&T. In effect, it was a way to stop users, many of whom lived outside the U.S., from buying an iPhone, then "unlocking" it to use on another carrier's network.