“Mobile carrier Vodafone Australia’s pre-registration website for the iPhone has lured about 40,000 visitors daily since the telco opened the site early last week,” Andrew Colley reports for Australian IT.
“The website allows consumers to sign up to purchase the iPhone ahead of the July 11 launch date,” Colley reports. “It is not clear how many visitors to the site have pre-registered to purchase the phone,.”
“Optus also has an iPhone pre-registration website,” Colley reports. “It offers priority queuing to customers willing to lodge a holding deposit for the device.”
Colley reports, “By early this week, however, it had stopped accepting advanced deposits for iPhones, citing problems keeping up with customer demand for the new handset. ‘Due to an overwhelming response, we have removed the deposit-taking mechanism from the website, an Optus spokeswoman said.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Matt” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: Thank you for your patience as our developer continues working on figuring out why the index page is suddenly causing our site to grind to a halt. We hope to have the solution soon.
let the flood begin
Several contributors have remarked that competitors, such as “These guys won’t just walk in here, and …” have no other choice but to bluster and dissemble.
Or they could just issue a press release.
“We give up, our phones suck!”
It’s better for everyone that way.
If the response at work (among people who were “dead-set” against purchasing the iPhone before the latest keynote) is any indication of what’s going on around the world (and this story would suggest it is), this is going to become a familiar theme.
~M
I, for one, hope your developer never finds the problem. Loading MacDailyNews has never been so enjoyable (as in fast). Eye Candy isn’t everything.
You should think about that before fixing the “problem”.
I agree with gregg
I gave up on the MDN home page a long time ago – the RSS feed is much more useful. Of course, it’s nice to have the whole site be snappy.
MDN … LISTEN UP!
Your website is A MISERABLE EXPERIENCE ON THE IPHONE. You have so much crap on this thing it has become almost useless. And forget about the useless RSS feed.
Trim this baby down, and knock off the mystical window that appears, then disappears, when coming to this site on an iPhone.
And kill the flash shit, too.
Looks like Rogers in Canada is down too.
http://www.rogers.com
I am always pleased coming to MDN, I wish it would update news more often, I havent noticed any probs viewing it
Hopefully Telstra has been left out of the game because it told Apple to “stick to its knitting”. But I guess you’ll still be able to use an unlocked version with them…
MDN, when the iPod became popular you spun off iPodDailyNews. I believe it’s time for you to spin off iPhoneDailyNews so MDN can get back to Mac news.
thx…
— jcw
@ Connor MacBook
Hell yeah – I hope the bastards go broke! As do MANY Aussies!
seems to me steve jack doesn’t know what to do. sorry mdn, as much as i like your site stop the charade please, you are a one person shop. we were always making fun of the enderle group, which consists of stupid old enderle and his wife, as much as the “we” in mdn consists of, well, only jack. otherwise keep up the good work and simply hire someone who knows what he or she is doing. i mean, c’mon, i could fix that.
Rogers was never up, the site took forever before they put up this pathetic excuse for a promo add and then almost 2 days before all they could do is link to the press release on there investor relations page. Just wait till the crowd show up at the Rogers stores on July 11th to find that the sales staff don’t know what an iPhone is and if they do know there will only be 1 per store.
I’m very pleased that I got my deposit down with Optus the day they were announced. With receipt in hand I will be in the store on the 11th with baited breath!!
I’m looking forward to the upgrade and will give my mother my 1st gen 8GB iPhone (Unlocked)
MDN – Not soon enough, this isn’t freakin’ rocket science – Geesh!
I wonder if Telstra, who tried to sell the iPhone with their crapware pre-installed and whose flagship store in Sydney is across the road from Apple’s new shining and gleaming store, is suffering from an increasing amount of regret. The amount of press the iPhone has had here is ridiculous.
Apple should stick to their knitting eh?
The smartphone talking heads have no idea that the tsunami is about to crush the old school cell phones!
Idiots!
Why doesn’t MDN take out all the ads from the main page. If that has no problem, then add a set one at a time to identify the culprit.
I’m glad the Aussies are getting the iPhone. The more that buy into the model the cheaper it will get.
What sort of bait do you use?
I lived in Australia for 8 years and know that they are very fast to take up new technologies. I look for the iPhone to sell there faster (on a population based comparison) faster than anywhere in Europe.
I also anticipate that there will be some Aussie developers delivering some very nice apps.