“Apple Inc’s iPhone 5 hit stores around the globe on Friday, giving the consumer giant a boost ahead of the crucial end-of-year holiday season,” Jane Wardell and Tim Kelly report for Reuters. “The new phone – which was unveiled last week – went on sale across Asia with mobile carriers reporting record demand.”
“‘It’s thin and light. I’ve used Samsung before, but the operation, the feeling, of the iPhone is better,’ said Wataru Saito, a semiconductor engineer who had been queuing in Tokyo since mid-afternoon on Thursday with his suitcase, as he had a flight to catch on Friday,” Wardell and Kelly report. “Apple has booked more than 2 million pre-orders for the device in the first 24 hours, double the first-day sales of the previous iPhone 4S.”
Wardell and Kelly report, “Softbank and Singtel, Singapore’s biggest mobile phone operator, said demand for the iPhone 5 had exceeded previous offerings from Apple, partly because the new phones could work on 4G networks that offered much faster data speeds. KDDI Corp, the other Japanese carrier offering the iPhone, said that it had already run out of the new phone. Australia’s Telstra Corp Ltd reported online pre-orders sold out in a record 18 hours and said it was discussing bi-weekly restocking with Apple.”
“Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in town for a business forum, was among a crowd of several hundred lining up for an iPhone 5 in sub-tropical Brisbane,” Wardell and Kelly report. “‘I just feel this impulse, like I want to be part of this big adventure, this big revolution and this advance in technology,’ Wozniak, who stopped working for Apple in the late 1980s, told local television.”
Read more in the full article here.
I should have mine before 1030am. Come on UPS.
When UPS arrives at my residence today, I’m first in line. Whoop-whoop!!
Walked into an At&T store at 8am here to buy a case. They let me bypass the line and I purchased a white one. Was in and out by 8:15. Awaiting delivery for my husband’s phone which will arrive by noon. The is gorgeous and fast! Everyone will fall in love with this device and it is so much easier to hold in your hand.
Quick no doubt! That alone makes it worth it for me. Lovin it.
Did your AT&T store have bumpers or cases? I noticed apple App Store had nothing as of yet for either. I want a bumper. A case covers to much of the phone.
I don’t know whether to laugh or laugh.
I got excited on the way to work when i heard Woz was in my little city
You can keep him if you want.
Gee, I sure hope stays quiet and has some escorts or bodyguards while he is in the line up or he might find himself in a reenactment of the Battle of Brisbane. It’s the instinctive response of so many true blue Anustralians.
Oh wait, he’ll be handing them out some money, he should be fine.
Woz stopped working for Apple in the late 80’s? Woz stopped working PERIOD in the late 70’s. He left Apple in the 80’s. Since then, he’s been a full-time advocate of technological communism (i.e., redistribution).
Woz, stopped working, but didn’t cease to be productive.
When you work on something you truly enjoy, it’s no longer work. It’s fun, it’s challenging and beneficial to society.
I am not judge to his current status, but I say it’s difficult to say, based on the above definition, when and where he slipped from one, drudge work, to enjoy work, to simple veg-ing.
I seriously doubt he’s ever veg-ed, more than let’s any other normal hard working person.
I’m surprised anyone is buying an iPhone 5. From all over the blogosphere I hear that Maps app is terrible and Apple’s biggest mistake ever. You just know if Steve Jobs was alive, that would never have happened. Are the Japanese really buying iPhones? I thought they hated smartphones that came without physical keyboards, E-wallets and “one-seg” digital TV.
/s
God I love Brisbane! Mount Cootha – a great little restaurant there high up so you can see all of Brisbane. I was lucky enough to work down there a few years ago. Australia is just amazing. If the country had had many more central mountain ranges for a more friendlier life sustaining ecosystem and less desert it would probably easily be the population size near the United States and lots more powerful as a nation. Still 20 million or so people mostly living in the coastal areas ain’t bad and what a coastal area it is, with sometimes dangers to watch out for (marine stingers, crocs and the like). I had gone to the east coast tropics first and then to Maui later and was disappointed in Maui because Australia’s Gold Coast had it beat! Comes off like a tropical fantasy park. Anyway just waiting around for my iPhone 5 to arrive here in SoCal. Yippee skippy! Oh happy day for us all.
And Moreton Bay bugs – now those are good eating.