O2 telling porkies over iPhone pre-order deliveries today

Friday, July 11th, 2008

O2 has said, in an official statement, that ‘customers that were successful in the pre-order will receive their iPhone 3G on Friday. The only exception is customers who live in certain postcodes, north from Aberdeen who will receive on Monday’–but I’m not the only one who’s been told by the telecoms company that I won’t get mine until ’some time’ after today. It’s more than irritating when O2 stores have had stock delivered to them for today’s grand unveiling, albeit at the very most 24 units each.

The guy behind technology website Electric Pig is within the London M25 belt, and, like me, managed to get through the online ordering fiasco on Monday. But he’s been told the same. I dropped him a line to let him know, and am quoted with permission here, along with other readers in much the same boat. The M25 is a long way from Aberdeen, as is Skipton, where I live. So what gives? Does O2 have some very oddly distorted maps of the UK drawn up by people on perception-altering class A drugs? Or do its customer service staff have as much grasp on geography as George W Bush?

The O2 website’s ‘track your order’ section is back up this morning, having spent most of the week in a highly unstable state, more offline than on, and is still telling me that my order is ‘in progress’.

It all smacks of being highly unfair to those of us who pre-registered to be informed via email as to when we could order our new iPhones via the website, and were lucky enough to get through on Monday to place our orders.

The situation is only compounded by unnecessary lies coming from O2 in what are presumably efforts by the company to save face, although there have been suggestions that O2 has manufactured the stock crisis to hype up the iPhone 3G launch. If that’s true, it’s a nasty business trick but not one that is without precedent—although given that some people have had their deliveries today confirmed, yesterday by email or text message, I think it highly unlikely my order will arrive this morning as I’ve had no such communication.

The arrival of the second-generation iPhone isn’t generating as much media heat as the original launch, however. Instead, it is Apple’s grand unveiling of the Application Store that has stirred up a lot of interest.

Accessible via iTunes (the new version to allow this was released yesterday) or the iPhone (old or new model) and iPod Touch, the App Store offers free and charged-for programs that can be downloaded to the devices and extend their abilities. What’s particularly interesting is that games have now come to the Apple touchscreen handhelds, turning them into the equivalent of portable Wiis thanks to some clever uses of the in-built motion sensors.

To give just one example of what I’m talking about, there’s a driving game where your handheld device becomes the steering wheel, responding to movement as you negotiate virtual roads. Needless to say, we can only hope people don’t play these games while crossing roads. Or, for that matter, walking down the street. Still, Nintendo must be feeling a little bruised right now.

Being able to install applications on to mobile phones is nothing new, of course. What’s new is the ease of doing so thanks to an attractive shop front displaying all the possibilities, and a seamless install process that doesn’t require technical knowledge. Having tried to install programs on non-Apple phones before today, I can testify to the likes of Nokia, LG, and Motorola never having made it easy.

Microsoft is so worried that Apple’s share of the market for computers in the past 12 months continued its upward trend, in defiance of the credit crunch and with a massive 40-plus percentage hike on last year’s sales figures, that it plans an advertising offensive that will presumably tell all the stupid common people we’re wrong about Vista, perhaps employing a slogan on billboards along the lines of: ‘Vista. It isn’t shit. No, really.’

You’d think the undisputed market leader would be better off fixing the shortcomings of its latest operating system, perhaps, but independent analysts have identified most of Apple’s increased sales of laptops and desktops have been to Windows refugees new to Macs. Still, it’s hard to see what angle of attack might prove worthwhile pursuing, given that Mac owners can install Windows—any version—to run alongside OS X, and run it at much faster speeds than the best PCs out there. If they want to, which many don’t. Yet there’s a delicious irony in the fact that the best Windows Vista experience is on a Mac.

While Microsoft seems to have been very quiet for some time now, and suffers from an image of being monolithic and dull, Apple has been releasing new innovations at a rate of knots, in both hardware and software. It’s no wonder the company is doing so extraordinarily well.

Now. Where’s my bloody iPhone? :-)

categories: all wired up