It has been an interesting morning for the UK’s iPhone 3G launch. For those of you waking up to your morning MyMac fix and weekly podcast download, let me fill you in on how things have been going here.
UK availability for the iPhone is from Apple, UK carrier O2 and phone reseller Carphone Warehouse. On Monday of this week, O2 sent email to everyone who had registered an interest saying to come to the website and pre-order for courier delivery today. Their site then wilted under a barrage of requests (13,000 a second at its peak) and they sold the lot! Carphone Warehouse’s site stayed up, but I placed an online order at around 1pm and while it was accepted, they cancelled it due to lack of stock on Wednesday.
I have been calling my local Apple Store all week to see if they would have any in. I spoke to an employee at 7pm last night, and he still had no information on whether anything other than demo units would be in store today. Their website had no further information at 10.30pm last night while I got ready to record the podcast.
Our good friend Don McAllister over at ScreenCastsOnline (http://www.screencastsonline.com) headed out to an O2 store near him early this morning. When he arrived (in the rain – British Summer!) there were four people in line, rising to 13 by 7.30am, and 23 by the 8.02am opening time. When he got inside, stock was limited (only 6 of the 16gb models), and the O2 instore processing systems for activation promptly fell over and were down for some time, causing much frustration – they ended up using a manual fallback process to enable his phone. He also found a previously cancelled online order had been re-enabled by O2 and was advised to turn it away when it arrives today!
As for me, I spotted via MacWorld UK that Carphone Warehouse were taking orders again yesterday. I called at 7.30pm last night, and my phone was delivered to home at 9.30am this morning. Result, and no rain queuing!
Don likes the feel of his phone, but is disappointed that the dock no longer is included – old dock is too small. I am looking forward to the app store, and getting iPhone features like Visual Voicemail and unlimited over-the-air data, both features unavailable to me with my unlocked Gen 1 device.
And according to Gizmodo this morning, iPhone 2.0 has already been SIM unlocked and jailbroken. This will keep resale prices for contractless Gen 1 iPhone very high.
Good luck for those buying today – I hope AT&T have better systems than O2. For our UK readers, be aware that contrary to previous reports and even the information given to me by Apple, UK Apple Stores DO have phones in stock and are selling them today. I guess Apple didn’t trust O2 either!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.