SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Thousands of U.S. gadget fans flocked to stores on Friday to be the first buyers of Apple’s iPhone, a music-playing and Web-browsing device expected to shake up the mobile industry.
Crowds lined up at some of Apple’s outlets cheered as their doors opened at 6 p.m. local time, while smaller groups waited outside AT&T stores. AT&T Inc. is the phone’s exclusive wireless carrier for the first two years, which many early reviewers cited as the phone’s biggest drawback. “I haven’t slept in a day and a half,” said Grant Johnson, 41, an accountant from Brooklyn who was one of the first to walk out of Apple’s Fifth Avenue outlet clutching the prize. “I need a nice hot shower and a bath.”
Early hitches included a hiccup in AT&T’s retail computer system that delayed some East Coast sales for 45 minutes, and a sluggish response from Apple’s online store shortly after it began offering iPhones. The iPhone melds a phone, Web browser and media player, and costs $500 to $600, depending on memory capacity. Technology gurus praised it as a “breakthrough” device, but questioned whether users would be unhappy with shortcomings such as its lack of a hardware keyboard and pokey Internet link.
Apple aims to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, which would amount to a 1 percent share of the global market. It has not given a sales goal for the launch, but some analysts said it could sell up to 400,000 units in the first few days.
Source: Reuters.com