5th in the queue on launch day but still 17 days until I get my iPhone!
Reviews from me have so far been pretty thin on the ground and I’m sorry. Its not that I’m being lazy, or even that I’m too caught up in playing with all of the great new App Store software to sit down and write, no its much worse than that. I STILL don’t have an iPhone!
I thought I was being cunning by selling my G1 iPhone a couple of days before the announcement of the 3G. I got a good price and I thought I’d only have a few days to wait to pick up the next model… Alas, Steve Jobs made us wait a month between his announcement and the release, and then to my dismay, Charles Dunstone has got me waiting another 2 weeks.
For those of you who don’t know, old Charlie is the Chairman of "The Carphone Warehouse". An "independent" phone shop chain that has 700 stores in the UK and a deal to sell iPhones on the o2 network alongside the Apple and o2 shops.
I am now being told that my iPhone will most likely be delivered on Monday 28th July. And its not like I just ordered it either, I queued for 3 hours at the opening of my local store and was the 5th person to the desk!! Unfortunately my local CPW (Brighton, Western Road) had been delivered 10 x 8gbs and only 2 x 16gbs.
Being number 5 I was given the choice of an 8gb iPhone there and then, or a 16gb delivered to my home the next day. The manager assured me that there were over 1500 in the warehouse when I ordered and that one of those was allocated to me for next day delivery. So I walked out £59 lighter and signed up to a £45 per month tariff with nothing more than a SIM card to show for my 3 hour wait!
Of course Saturday came and went, Monday came and went, I was told Friday delivery, then I was told that that delivery was only 8gbs, so I am now being told that the next delivery will be Friday 25th which should mean it actually gets to me on Monday July 28th. 17 days after I queued!
The best part is that I got my first o2 bill this morning! £45 for the month and I haven’t even got a phone!
Anyhow, you can rest assured that I have my eye on a number of apps that I’d like to try out and review and as soon as I have something to install it on I will be writing here!
Charles Dunstone, if you’re reading this, sort it out mate!
o2 seem to have sold out of 16gb iPhone 3G! In one morning!
The o2 website is now showing the message Please note: iPhone 3G 16GB Black is currently not available. and the options for the 16gb have been removed.
Have they really sold out of their first batch of 16gb iPhones already?
o2 Open for pre-orders…but their website is broken and they won’t answer the phone!
o2 sent our this email this morning inviting customers to go online and order an iPhone now for delivery by courier on 11th July.
But at the end of the process disaster strikes and the following error is given! And if you phone the number mentioned, and choose option 1 "Buy an iPhone" it tells you that you can only do this over the web. Doh!
The iPhone is great but sleeping rough for a week is a bit much isn’t it?
Engadget is reporting that people are queuing in New York City a week ahead of the iPhone 3G release! I can’t wait to get my new iPhone, but I’m not sure that I’m willing to sleep rough for a week to get to my hands on one!
It will be very interesting to see what the reaction will be like here in the UK. By some accounts the original launch of the iPhone here was a bit of an anti-climax with people reporting only a few stores in the whole country had any kind of queue…
The Best Things Come To Those Who Wait
Even knowing that the 3g iPhone announcement was imminent I decided that £169 was too good resist and I was the first customer of the day in my local store on the day that Apple reduced the price. And I have been very pleased with that decision – it’s just incredible!
The interface is fantastic and the best feature for me is the browser. It is by far and away the best mobile browser I have ever used. Compared to Safari on the Nokia E90 it is a completely different world. The way the iPhone’s Safari handles scrolling and zooming is fantastic and the speed to load is like nothing I’ve experienced on a mobile device before.
Where my E90 will often fall down and fail to get me into certain web sites, my hosting control panel for instance, the iPhone sails through and loads the pages perfectly and quickly. I don’t think I’ve come across a single website that the iPhone can’t handle and in terms of speed the iPhone on GPRS will give the E90 a run for its money on HSDPA when loading a heavy website.
Text input on the iPhone is also superb, which is really surprising considering the absence of any kind of hardware keyboard! The on screen keyboard is very well done and the auto-correcting software is the really clever part – this allows me to type on the iPhone really very quickly. Coming from a die-hard QWERTY-keyboard-phone guy (who has owned every Nokia Communicator since the 9000, and a load of Windows Mobile QWERTY phones), that might be surprising!
There are, though, a couple of areas where it shows that this is Apple’s first attempt at a phone.
