Comments on: Breathtaking O2 incompetence reduces iPhone 3G launch to farce

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:25:46 +0000

Update: Got one!
The guy who sorted me out at the store said that after getting just two people through in the morning, and having had some people wait for over four hours – one guy arrived just as I started filling in paperwork who’d been sent to Cambridge from London(!?) – they finally fell-back to a manual system at about 4:30. I snuck out of work at 5:15 (I’ve honestly never known everyone to stay in the office so long past 5pm on a Friday! I don’t like being the first to leave, having arrived fairly late after spending the morning in the Apple store – but all I was doing was waiting for a server-build to finish, so no great loss there…) and managed to get home through the traffic by 5:30pm. I grabbed the (ultimately unnecessary) paperwork and proof of address, then sprinted off down the road back into town. Just a little hot and flustered, I got into the Apple Store at spot-on 5:45pm (that’s got to be a new personal best!). As I appraoched the back desk, I recognised the Finn I’d met that morning at one of the benches buying his iPhone They were just getting ready to shut-up shop for the day, and there was another guy after me. By the time I’d finished (6:15 after a hasty sign-up), there were four (iPhone) customers remaining. The tired-looking guy who activated the phone said that I was actually only the sixteenth person that day who’d been able to complete the sign-up process successfully – and he said that he’d heard that the actual O₂ store had only sold two phones and Carphone Warehouse none. Probably apocryphal, but sadly completely believable.
The only problem now is that the phone wants to connect to iTunes to activate, but iTunes throws up an error when I do so…

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:12:48 +0000

For anyone wondering, the blog timestamps are in UTC/Zulu, whereas the times I'm referring to are local - currently British Summer Time (not that you'd know from the weather this afternoon...)

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:05:51 +0000

Update: 2pm, Apple Store guy says that they’ve tried putting a few people through, but that the process is still taking up to half an hour per customer to return a result, and the the vast majority of attempts are still failing.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:13:02 +0000

Update: Midday, T+4 hours. Phoned Apple Store and the systems are still all down, no phones sold, and they suggest trying again in a couple of hours.
The guy at the store says that O₂ stores only are letting people take away the handsets unactivated, “as they have the contract details”. I’m not sure whether this is referring only to existing customers, or to new customers with a signed contract. In any case, it doesn’t sound as if it’s possible to get a handset without one.