“It’s a mess,” says Apple’s new iPhone & Service User…

Apple Inc.’s new iPhone went on sale on Friday 8 a.m. and that’s when nightmare for many new iPhone enthusiasts started. Since the new iPhone has been subsidized by the exclusive carrier if bought with their contracts, Apple and the carrier had planned to activate the phone right at the point of purchase i.e. the stores.

Result…huge queues of people were seen outside the store ahead of 8 a.m., many even camped out overnight to be first. What happened then???

First…It took the store half an hour to get the phone activated. This itself caused, the enthusiasm of many in queue behind the first person, die down at that very instant.

Second…there was a global problem with Apple Inc.’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store.

Third…The problem extended to owners of the previous iPhone model. A software update released for that phone on Friday morning required the phone to be reactivated through iTunes.

Fourth…”It’s a mess,” said some, who updated their first-generation iPhone only to find it unusable.

The new phone went on sale Friday in 21 countries, with one more, France, following next week. In most of them it was the first time any iPhone was officially sold there, though several countries have seen a brisk grey-market trade in phones imported from the U.S.

IPhone fever was strong even in Japan, where consumers are used to tech-heavy that do restaurant searches, e-mail, music downloads, reading digital novels and electronic shopping. More than 1,000 people lined up at the Softbank Corp. store in Tokyo and the phone quickly sold out.

VS