Hundreds of eager Canadians lined up outside stores across the country Friday in hopes of getting their hands on the iPhone 4S, Apple’s much-hyped new smartphone.
At Toronto’s Eaton Centre, some Apple loyalists had staked their spot in line as early as Thursday morning, hoping they’d be among the first to get the device that has a faster processor and an improved camera than its predecessor.
The crowd cheered when the Apple store opened its doors at 8 a.m.
There were also lineups in London, Ont., outside several electronics stores.
Kyle Milec of London drove to Kitchener’s Apple store to get his new smartphone and said the point of purchase is all part of the experience.
“I like coming out to the Apple store just because it’s a great environment,” he told radio station AM980.
“The staff gets everybody all riled up and really excited before they open the doors and it’s always a lot more fun.”
The iPhone launch comes after days of turbulence in the smartphone industry as a glitch knocked many of the services of rival BlackBerry’s smartphones off-line, creating a storm of angry users who venting on social networks.
Research In Motion (TSX:RIM), maker of the BlackBerry, is attempting to clean up the public relations mess just as the new Apple product hits the market.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse for RIM,” said Troy Crandall, technology and telecom analyst at MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier Inc. in Montreal.
Get daily National news
“You don’t want to have a lot of negative press ahead of major competitive launches, but that’s exactly what happened.”
Crandall said it won’t be easy to determine what sort of impact the RIM outage will have on its business, at least not in the next few months. He believes the process will play out over a longer period.
But some users pledged to look for other smartphones to replace their BlackBerry, and a few of them turned up at Apple stores Friday morning.
In New York, Una Chen, a 24-year-old banker, said she was just happy to swap out her BlackBerry Bold for the new iPhone, particularly after the outage.
“It’s not good to have a phone and not be able to use it,” Chen said.
Many diehard Apple fans and investors were disappointed that Apple didn’t launch a more radically redesigned new model – an iPhone 5. It’s been more than a year since Apple’s previous model was released.
That also may have contributed to smaller gatherings at some Apple locations.
“People are not as excited about this version as they might have been if a (iPhone) 5 came out,” said Charles Prosser, 50, a retired teacher and a computer technician from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Steve Wozniak, who created Apple with Steve Jobs in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was first in line at a store in Los Gatos, Calif. Wozniak got in line at the California store even though he already had two new phones on the way. He told television station NBC11 on Thursday that while he waited for the store’s opening Friday morning, he planned on getting caught up on his email and chatting with fans.
Many said the event resembled a remembrance to Jobs, who died last week, a day after Apple Inc. announced the new phone.
Emily Smith, a 27-year-old user experience designer in New York, checked in to the line on the location-centric social network Foursquare. She got a virtual Steve Jobs badge that read: “Here’s to the crazy ones. ThankYouSteve.”
Others joked that the 4S model stood for “for Steve.”
Tony Medina, a 25-year-old student from Manhattan, got in line at 11 p.m. and stayed despite getting soaked by an overnight thunderstorm. He said he planned on ordering the phone online, but decided to join the crowds to honour Jobs. “For loyalty, I felt I had to do the line,” he said. “I had to say thank you.”
Apple and phone companies in seven countries started taking orders for the iPhone 4S last Friday. Apple said Monday that more than one million orders came in, breaking the record set by last year’s model, which was available in fewer countries and on fewer carriers.
– With files from The Associated Press, AM980 and 680 News
Comments