“Apple fans queued through the night in Germany and Britain to be among the first in Europe to buy an iPhone, the must-have gadget that is set to shake up the mobile industry,” Nicola Leske and Kate Holton report for Reuters.
“Over 10,000 iPhones were sold by Friday afternoon in Germany, a T-Mobile spokeswoman said, after it went on sale at midnight in a Deutsche Telekom shop in Cologne,” Leske and Holton report.
“In Britain, fans had to wait until 1800 GMT before the music-playing, Web-browsing phone went on sale at stores from Apple, mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and mobile operator O2,” Leske and Holton report. “The queue outside central London’s main Apple store stretched around the corner and long lines also formed in the city’s financial area.”
“The phone will go on sale in France at the end of the month,” Leske and Holton report.
Full article here.
MarketWatch reports, “Customers bought the phones via the company’s shops or on the internet, T-Mobile said.”
“Sales also started in the U.K. Friday, with Europe’s largest mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse PLC (CPW.LN) expecting to sell 10,000 iPhones on the first day of sale in the U.K.,” MarketWatch reports.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
I’m thinking that Europe’s sales numbers are gonna beat the US numbers for sure… They aren’t used to subsidised phones so the price wont seem astronomical… And of course – no subsidies means no contracts means no waiting till your contract runs out to get one.
That’s a good sales record for the first few hours…
Wonder what Steve Ballmer is doing right now…….
I think Office Depot got an order for a bunch of chairs recently……
Apparently Germans don’t JUST love David Hasselhof
$2,000,000 an hour
yeah sounds like AAPL
Subsidized phones are common in Europe too.
Brits stand in queues? Is that news? Is this CNN? No it’s Reuters – who bought Reuters?
T-Mobile representatives handed out blankets and umbrellas as well as hot tea, coffee and pretzels. Tea, coffee and pretzels, is this England? or New York? Give us the bier and sauerkraut!
I think you’ll find that people in Europe (the UK at least) are used to subsidies and contracts. Only people on pay as you go buy their phones generally and this isn’t pay as you go.
Man the iTunes set up is sweet, took 10 minutes, sync nearly done, farkin’ brill apple.
@hmmm
“They aren’t used to subsidised phones so the price wont seem astronomical… And of course – no subsidies means no contracts means no waiting till your contract runs out to get one.”
Actually one of the criticisms of the iPhone over here is the price because we ARE used to subsidised phones and the iPhone seems expensive when taking into account the lack of 3G and the low quality camera, plus the single network lock-in. The mobile phone market is more advanced in the UK and Europe compared to the States. After the initial excitement has died down I’d be surprised if it does as well as it has in the US.
Anyway personally I wouldn’t buy a phone with a battery that I couldn’t easily replace. The interface is cool and web surfing over WiFi is nice but there’s too much wrong with the iPhone to get me interested. I’d rather have a conventional phone that I can use on any network and a higher capacity iPod Touch.
AJK: “Anyway personally I wouldn’t buy a phone with a battery that I couldn’t easily replace. The interface is cool and web surfing over WiFi is nice but there’s too much wrong with the iPhone to get me interested. I’d rather have a conventional phone that I can use on any network and a higher capacity iPod Touch.”
The Non replaceable battery is a HUGE feature.
You pay an ENORMOUS cost in terms of LESS battery capacity, bulk and device weight to get a replaceable battery.
By saying this is important to you, you’re saying its more important to have a replaceable battery than how long you can actually USE the device on a given day. How often do you replace a battery, if ever? I have had several cell phones prior to my iPhone I can’t recall replacing the battery on a single one of them, have you actually done this?
That just really smells like troll bait, I’m sorry.
Any network thing I’ll give you IF you do not like the network that Apple has signed up with, the capacity thing is a non starter too as iPhones will rapidly gain capacity as new models come out.
AJK’s post signals the start of deja vu all over again! Is this going to happen every time iPhone is released in a new market?
Meanwhile, the BBC’s “technology expert” has declared that the lines for the iPhone are not the longest he’s seen for a new tech product! So I suppose it is headed for a failure there.
iPhone, bitch!!!
“AJK’s post signals the start of deja vu all over again! “
Well, his/her complaints sound familiar, but the difference is that there was no iPod touch at the time of the U.S. release. Europeans don’t have to own an iPhone to get all the multi-touch goodness like we did last June. To me, that makes the excitement over the iPhone intro in Europe even more phenomenal.
ten people in the line when i got mind was getting bigger as i left
It all went well until Carphone Warehouse tried to check my details and then the whole system went tits up. I ended up going to the nearest O2 shop after half an hour of frustration. They sorted it in six minutes. CW are going to get slaughtered in the press tomorrow.
If T-Mobile would have been the carrier in the U.S. I would have bought an iPhone myself on the first day. AT@T are spying nazi fascists…
lets go to china and india – 10K big deal – all that hoopla about 10,000 phones cmonget away from this European conundrum – face it – India and china – SJ when will you get away from this line of thinking???
Point well taken there.
I felt the same way. I have an 80Gb iPod and it’s awesome.
But My son has an iPhone.
For me it’s just a matter of time before I get one.
To have all my calendars, contacts, notes and todos in one device. Wow. AND Google maps and email and and and and….
I’m as much a Apple/Mac fan as anyone and I only have Macs in my Windows-free home plus a couple of iPods. I think the iPhone is a great product so I’m happy to see Apple have success with it but I was merely saying it doesn’t yet appeal to me because of its shortcomings. Over here I do consider it to be over-priced when I look at the whole package. The other main cons being the tie to O2 and lack of 3G. The lack of 3G is also a pro as far as battery life goes but O2’s Edge network only covers 30% of the UK.
Although I’ve been lucky with my iPod batteries I do dislike the idea that I’d have to return an iPod to Apple just because of a dead battery. A phone is a more important and a much more expensive device so to think that if the battery died I might have to be without my phone until Apple replaced it is a fairly big con to me.
There’s plenty of pros too but not enough for me. At the moment we have all the hype and hysteria so I expect it’ll sell out it quickly but when things have calmed down I’ll be interested in seeing how the sales hold up. Most mobile users who have a contact are used to getting their phones for free or pretty cheap and then there’s the huge prepay market which isn’t catered for by the current iPhone. A future generation iPhone will probably be network neutral and also available on prepay by which time I think Apple will be one of THE big players in mobile communications.
@twilightmoon@mac.com
Yes I have replaced batteries and no my comments are not troll bait but appreciate that anything remotely negative is going to be called trolling. As an Apple/Mac fan I’m not required to only heap praise on their products and can in fact point out what I consider to be negative points.
“The Non replaceable battery is a HUGE feature.”
That’s just hilarious. I suppose shuffle was a great innovative feature too. I don’t there would be an enormous cost in bulk etc.
“the capacity thing is a non starter too as iPhones will rapidly gain capacity as new models come out.”
Well that’s great for future models but doesn’t change the fact the capacity is currently low, especially when we’re invited to store music, video, photos etc on it. It’s a bit sad that it’s only 8GB when the iPod Touch has up to 16GB.
@Abdullah
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“AJK’s post signals the start of deja vu all over again!”
Hmmm, déjà vu all over again? You might want to think about that one again
Just to clarify again, I think the iPhone is a fab device with a number of flaws in both the phone and the contract and I wish Apple every success with it. No doubt I’ll get an iPhone in a year or twos time when there are less restrictions and the device has matured. In the meantime I hear an iPod Touch calling my name so maybe Santa will bring me one.
I am sat watching my iPhone bought half an hour ago from the Glasgow Store. God almighty it is beautiful. The activation was easy peasy though iTunes. It is hard to understate its coolness.
There were about a hundred at the checkout all ready for people to take away and the purchases were steady. I wonder if all the O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores are the same?
I have a temp number because I have not booted Orange in to touch yet. It seems I can port my permanent number over within 30 days, but I am a happy boy.
Magic word ‘rather’ as in – I’d rather scoop my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon than use my RAZR for a minute longer.