Alex Halliday

I know I join many people out there in venting my frustration at the awful release of the iPhone under o2 this week. We have all been massively excited at the biggest gadget launch of the year so far. So what a let down for it to be such an awful experiance for existing customers.

First of all, the o2 iPhone store experianced massive technical difficulties….Apparently they “did not anticipate such huge demand”…..highly unlikely considering the amount of coverage of the launch, huge spike in traffic to their website leading up to the launch and success of the first iPhone. Have they not heard of cloud computing? It would have been very easy to to use a service like Flexiscale or EC2 to fire up a few hundred extra servers for the day and would have kept all of the current customers quite happy.

Secondly, new customers are able to buy phones at o2 stores and Apple stores in London while existing customers are being turned away. While the economics of this move seems logical (if not a bit unfair), in this day and age of Blogging, twittering, texting Apple fans, the average iPhone consumer is far better informed than 5 years ago. This is obvious, irritating and a cheap shot. By drawing forward this revenue a few months, they do little to better their position in the long term and piss off the early adopters.

Finally, the phone itself. It just isn’t as nice as the original iPhone. Cheap plastic feeling, lower battery life and NO dock included. Give me something for free one time and i expect it the next time….very irritating.
Anyway, i look forward to Nokia’s iPhone competitor and let’s hope they take a leaf out of Steve Job’s book :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UjU0rtavE