The time was 5am on Thursday 24th June 2010, and I’d just woken up. Fine, many of you will say. We all get up at this sort of time for work. But I wasn’t going to work, I was going to queue. I know this statement makes me look like the most British man ever, as if I go out in search of the best queue through the day and join each one I find, rating them out of 10 (I admit that a website about this does actually interest me…).
I was going to a special queue, for the iPhone 4. It’s the first time I’ve ever queued for the launch of something before, and to be honest had I not had two of mates there, I don’t know if I’d had the will power. By 6.30am I was in the queue, and about the 18th person there. By 8am when the store was about to open, I was 18 in a queue of around 200. Two members of staff from o2 arrived, and offered everyone in the queue tea, coffee, water and soft drinks. I can’t fault Kate and Sharon, they were both chatty, friendly, and helped the time pass and make it more bearable and almost a little fun! This culminated in them holding a competition when I was one person from the entrance to win Kings Of Leon tickets. I love Kings Of Leon and was gutted when I didn’t win, even more so when one of my friends I was with did. But then not enough people along the queue won so it came back to the start and to my delight I won! Two tickets to
Kings Of Leon in Hyde Park were mine, get in! A lot of the queue had to be sent away as there simply weren’t enough units to cover demand, something which seems to have happened at stores across the country.
Eventually I got in there and before long I was the proud owner of an iPhone 4. Having previously owned an iPhone 8GB 3G it was a no-brainer for me that I would want a new iPhone. I had been interested by other phones, the obvious one being the Blackberry, and the Puma Phone which is still to be launched in the UK and which we reviewed a couple of months ago. But neither has the complete package that the iPhone 4 offers. But what’s different? Here are some of the new features:
- A battery with 40% more life than the last model.
- A 5mp camera complete with flash and zoom.
- A forward and back facing video camera to allow video conferencing.
- Able to put multiple apps into one folder on your home page to cut down on clutter.
- Faster speeds at uploading/downloading.
- Customisable wallpapers for your homepage.
- A new slimmer design with glass on the front and back to make it more robust.
- A minimum size memory of 16GB with a bigger one of 32GB available.
- It’s not just available through o2, you can also get them through Orange, T Mobile, Vodafone and Tesco Mobile.
Anyone that’s seen the new iPhone will struggle to argue that it’s a much better looking phone. Rumours are already abound, such as the screen having a yellow tinge or if you hold the bottom left side of the phone you lose signal. I have to admit that I haven’t noticed any of these problems and I’m loving the new phone. It’s slick, it’s fast, it’s got some great new features and it will be yet another hit for Apple. 1.5 million sales on the launch day is proof of that. And would I queue for the launch of something again? If it was something as good as iPhone 4, then sure why not. Especially if I get the sort of queue experience I had this time! Coming up – a full Kings Of Leon review!
This post is by The Gent. Check with your local o2 store for iPhone 4 availibility. Follow The Gent on Twitter – @The__Gent.
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JJ
