iPhone 3G Launch Fiasco - Part 2

A bit late but I thought I'd best complete the story of the iPhone 3G launch fiasco from my perspective for posterity.

As you may be aware from my previous post, the iPhone I'd ordered online had been cancelled by O2 so if I wanted a phone, I had to take my chance with everyone else at the O2 store on Friday 11th.

Just to step back a day, the V2.0 of the iPhone firmware had been leaked and I'd managed to upgrade my 1st gen iPhone to the new firmware and access the new App store - magic. From my early exploration, it quickly became apparent that the GPS feature was likely to be a killer feature so I sort of decided that I'd take my chance getting in line on Friday.

Checking with the O2 website for what I needed to bring to the store, I thought it best to take a print out of my account and logged on to do just that. Whilst logged on, I stumbled across a "My Orders" page and lo and behold, there was my online order for the iPhone that I'd been notified had been cancelled.

Thinking there was no way they could screw up so badly, I sent off an email (this is the day before launch) asking them to confirm the onlne order had in fact, been cancelled as the page didn't show any sign of the order being cancelled. I didn't worry too much as the O2 site did say that anyone due for an iPhone via courier tomorrow would receive a confirmation text before 6pm on the Thursday. No worries then!

So 6pm came and went so I decided to take my place in the line on Friday.

I set my alarm for the following morning and went to bed.

I awoke an hour earlier than intended at 5:45am due to the fact I'd set the alarm incorrectly. Ah well, must have been an omen!

I set off for my local O2 store and arrived in the summer rain at around 6:45am.

Luckily, I wasn't the only lunatic and to my delight, found another two people in the queue before me. Always guaranteed to meet a great bunch of people at these events! By 8:02am the line had grown to over 25 people which for a relatively small store, I found astounding! The first guy in the line was Peter McCullogh and Peter shot a short video and posted it to Vimeo.

At promptly 8:02am, the doors were opened and the first four of us were let into the store. As there were 5 staff to 4 customers, I thought this should be quick and painless. Ever the optimist.

So they started to gather details and started to process customers one and two.

As I said, they started but didn't get very far.

All the necessary internal systems they needed to process the orders failed or they couldn't log in.

Can someone tell me in this day and age why a technology company doesn't have the capacity for all of their stores to access their internal corporate systems simultaneously? Now this isn't 13,000 requests per second as they stated they received on Monday, but probably 2 or 3 reps from a couple of hundred stores - unbelievable!

Now at least we were in the store unlike the 20 or so customers left outside.

So we waited whilst the staff made various calls and sent emails to find out what to do.

And we waited...

Thirty minutes in, a quick check on my email and there is an email from O2. Yes, you guessed it!

Dear sir, your online order we said was cancelled has not been cancelled. In fact, it has already been dispatched and should be with you today! We suggest that you refuse delivery so that this order gets cancelled.

Unbelievable!

So anyway, fifty minutes had passed and the store finally get an email to revert to manual processes and just use paperwork to process the upgrades.

Ten minutes later, we're on the street with our new iPhones.

The store had 4 16GB phones and approx. 16 8GB phones so I've no idea if everyone in the line eventually got a new iPhone.

So I dashed home, way, way behind on my usual production timetable for the weekly screencastsonline show. I swapped the SIM out of my existing phone, plugged in the new iPhone 3G into iTunes and 20 minutes later after restoring my current iPhone image I was away and running. Thankfully I managed to miss the later activation problems that most other people seemed to experience.

Another half an hour later and what turns up but the courier with a second 16GB iPhone. With a heavy heart, I turned him and the other iPhone away.

So now I have my iPhone 3G fully activated and working. I've been having a play with the 3G and the Apps and the GPS but I'll leave my deliberations on those for another posting.

So Apple went against my prediction that they would not go with a "Big Bang" approach to the role out of MobileMe, the App Store and the iPhone 3G.

More fool them!