Although the crowds weren’t quite as large this weekend, it does seem as if hundreds of thousands of new iPhones were sold. AT&T along claims several hundred thousand preorders, and there were unknown numbers from Apple before the 3G S was released on Friday. By Sunday, however, the truth was out there. Steve Jobs himself, still Apple’s CEO, reported over one million units sold, way ahead of analyst estimates.
This time, Apple and its wireless carrier partners acted in an intelligent fashion. By taking preorders, they didn’t force customers to wait hours in front of the store in the hope they wouldn’t be too late to get a spanking new iPhone 3G S.
For the most part, the activation issues that plagued customers last year didn’t occur, although there were some instances where the final activation process seemed to take far longer than it should. However, the complaints shouldn’t be near as voluminous.
When it comes to the iPhone 3.0 software update, Apple was smart enough to make it available two days earlier, to give the early adopters plenty of time to clog Apple’s servers. Well, it really wasn’t so bad. I downloaded my copy not five minutes after it became available, and there was no delay in retrieval. The update was uneventful for the most part.
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter. [1]