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New Apple iPhone goes on sale
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Serina Murphy (center) buys her iPhone 3G S at an Apple store in Santa Clara, Calif. (Robert Mullins photo)
The Apple hype machine worked its magic once again as people lined up early Friday morning to snap up its new iPhone 3G S.
More than 100 people were in line shortly before 7:00 a.m. at Westfield Shoppingtown Valley Fair in Santa Clara, Calif., to get into the Apple retail store at the mall to buy the smartphone first unveiled June 8 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
“I’m excited. I’ve been wanting an iPhone for the longest time,” said Serina Murphy, of San Jose, as a store employee rang up her iPhone 3G S purchase, her first. “The S stands for Serina.”
The new model went on sale at 7:00 a.m. in each U.S. time zone at 211 Apple stores and about 2,200 AT&T Mobility retail stores; AT&T is the exclusive wireless carrier for the iPhone.
"We're sold out at a lot of stores," said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman in San Francisco. For buyers who find there's no inventory available when they show up at a store, AT&T will do "direct fulfillment," he said, meaning they'll take an iPhone order in the store and ship the device directly to the customer's home in 7-10 days.
While the lines weren’t as long as when the first iPhone went on sale two years ago, Britton says that's partly because a number of customers pre-ordered their 3G S phones online so they could show up at a store at their leisure to pick it up.
But others preferred the old-fashioned way of getting up early to stand in line. “I have the original iPhone,” said Kevin Kyono, of San Jose, waiting at Valley Fair. “But this one has more features that are not supported on the original iPhone.”
The 3G S comes in two versions, a 16GB model for $199 and a 32GB model for $299. The price is net after a $100 rebate and requires a two year service contract with AT&T.
The iPhone 3G S is one of several new smartphones going on sale this spring and summer in a flurry of new product releases. The iPhone release was preceded by the launch June 6 of the Palm Pre. Wireless carrier T-Mobile is expected to announce next week plans for the release of an HTC smartphone running Google’s Android operating system. And RIM announced the coming launch of the BlackBerry Tour later this summer.
The iPhone has become such a part of popular culture that even one late night TV host got caught up in the 3G S buzz. David Letterman Thursday night commented on the thousands of people in the streets of Tehran protesting the presidential election results in Iran and the government's attempt to spin it: "The government says, 'No that's not protesters, that's just people lining up to get their new iPhones.'"
Click on the "Comment" link at the top of this story to tell us of your experience buying the iPhone 3G S. Did you have to wait long? Did they have one in stock for you? What's been your experience playing with the new phone? Let us know.
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