“Apple Inc’s new iPhone went on sale in stores across the globe on Friday, prompting thousands to queue around city blocks to snap up the final gadget unveiled during Steve Jobs’ life,” Mayumi Negishi and Michelle Martin report for Reuters.
“Queues wound down the street in Sydney, Tokyo, London, Paris and Munich as fans gathered to get their hands on the iPhone 4S, ahead of later store sales in North America,” Negishi and Martin report. “‘I am a fan, a big fan. I want something to remember Steve Jobs by,’ said Haruko Shiraishi, waiting patiently with her Yorkshire terrier Miu Miu at the end of an eight block queue in Tokyo’s smart Ginza shopping district.”
“The new model looks similar to the previous iPhone 4 but has an upgraded camera, faster processor and highly regarded voice-activated software, which allows users to ask questions,” Negishi and Martin report. “The phone — introduced just a day before Jobs died — was initially dubbed a disappointment because it fell short of being a revolution in design, but glowing reviews centred around its “Siri” voice-activated software have helped it set a record pace in initial, online sales orders.”
Negishi and Martin report, “On Regent Street in central London, the queue wound down a sidestreet and into a park, where Starbucks had a mobile stand to serve coffee. Of the 40 people to whom Reuters spoke in London, 13 were switching from other phones. ‘This is rubbish,’ one buyer at a north London store said, holding his Blackberry after owner Research in Motion struggled for days to fix an international outage of its Blackberry email and messaging services.”
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