O2 iPhone launch a bit of a mess
O2 iPhone launch a bit of a mess
Launching a product as hotly anticipated as the new iPhone should be a relatively straight forward affair – the shiny new handset pretty much sells itself, with pre-orders running into the tens of thousands, and the whole operation shouldn’t be much different to that of the original iPhone just over a year ago. Use the same systems, fulfil pre-orders, send out enough stock and so on, and you have yourself a smooth launch.
However, that wasn’t the case on Friday, as O2 managed to spectacularly bungle the iPhone 2.0’s first day on the shelves. Following the debacle that was the pre-order process, the chain launched the ‘Jesus Phone’ without enough stock to satisfy even half of most queues, and complicated matters with a long-winded and crash-prone activation process.
Many punters, who queued for hours outside O2 stores, were greeted by staff warning that their systems had gone down and to be prepared to wait for an hour or so before they could leave with their new toys. An Apple spokesman euphemistically described the sales systems linking O2 and Apple as ‘currently working but quite slowly.’ Read ‘quite slowly’ as ‘around 50 minutes per sale’. Apparently the two companies had not imagined that their systems might have to take quite a lot of extra traffic come Friday morning, and hadn’t prepared themselves for the onslaught.
Compounding the technical issues was the fact that most stores were severely stock limited. According to our compadres at The Inquirer, the store that they visited was only in possession of five 16GB iPhones, probably enough for...ooh, 5% of the people waiting for one. Carphone Warhouse, Apple’s other UK bed partner was similarly limited.
Most amusing of all the technical snafu’s hitting the launch though was news that Apple stores were running into trouble selling iPhones due to the activation process being reliant on Internet Explorer, when they only had Macs to process the sales. Apple experts were stuck with handsets that they wanted to sell and people wanted to buy, but Apple wouldn’t let them thanks to the lack of Windows based systems. Now there’s an advert for Mac compatibility, doncha think?
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