“Apple devotees in states largely disregarded under a formerly exclusive deal to distribute the iPhone rushed to stores to snap up the gadget early Thursday as Verizon Wireless entered the fray,” The Associated Press reports. “Phil Toso, the manager of a Verizon store in Baxter, Minn., said dozens of people showed up when the business opened at 7 a.m. Thursday. The store normally opens at 10. ‘The customers that are coming in are coming in for the iPhone,’ Toso said.”
“At the West Acres Shopping Mall, Madison Bratz, 20, said her Android cell phone had been the ‘next best thing in Fargo,’ but that she happily used up all her available funds to buy an iPhone Thursday when AT&T’s exclusive deal ended,” AP reports. “‘I totally spent my whole paycheck but I don’t care,’ the direct support specialist said, smiling. ‘I have waited so long for this. So long.'”
MacDailyNews Take: You’ve finally got the real thing, Madison. Welcome!
AP reports, “Previously excluded from the iPhone club because of AT&T’s at-best spotty coverage in this part of the country, cell-phone users in areas of the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska and Wyoming can now get the phone through the nation’s largest wireless carrier.”
Read more in the full article here.
Montana on that list?
I spend a lot of my summer in Montana… Never had coverage problems. Except when I go 30 miles outside town and fish where nobody gets coverage…
Send your donations to help those “starving” smartphone users…
Lewis & Clark can finally phone home.
@Backlash:
I’m in Montana, and I’ve been waiting for the iPhone for four years. The reason you can use your iPhone in MT is because one of our networks (our only GSM network) acts as a “mercenary” for AT&T so people can still dial from most places in the state, but users in MT can’t *buy* an iPhone without jailbreaking one and then going through a whole cluster**** of hoops.
That is changing this month for two reasons: A) Verizon, and B) AT&T bought the second largest network in the state in ’09 or ’10, (Alltel) and the system switchover is finally starting this month. Hallelujah! (I’m not switching to Verizon.)
Nebraskan who got mine on Tuesday. Four years man . . . . that’s a long time to wait.