I literally just finished watching Leo Laporte’s spectacular 24-hour live stream dedicated to the iPhone 3G’s launch, and despite only catching the beginning and end I have to give him a ton of props for not only making it all the way through, but for keeping it interesting the whole time to boot. When I first heard that he was going to try and put out 24 hours of content based around one phone, which has already been covered to death, I was pretty skeptical. To my surprise there was always something new to talk about, and it was the first glimpse of what I’m sure was Leo’s original vision with TWiT Live – he had “in the field” reporters at tons of different Apple stores across the country feeding him info with live video streams from services like Skype, oovoo and Qik. Sure there were technical difficulties but this medium is still quite young. All-in-all it was surprising just how well it worked. Some of the notable participants who showed up while I was watching include Kevin Rose, Cali Lewis, Randal Schwartz, Liana Lehua, and Jason Calacanis. Those are just the people who were on via video too! At around 4:00AM Leo’s time, just when he was starting to fade about 18 hours into the broadcast, Alex Lindsay showed up in-studio only to be followed by Scott Bourne a couple hours later. I have to admit It was kind of cool seeing the old salty dogs sticking it out in the end.
As important as Leo’s broadcast was to the progression of video broadcasting via the interwebs (his cumulative viewer count was near 300,000, a steady 8,000 watching at any given time) I wanted to discuss the actual iPhone 3G launch too. I didn’t expect it to be nearly as big as it was. In almost every location the geeky correspondent designated for that store said that they were seeing numbers larger than they saw at the first iPhone’s launch a year ago. That’s kind of a shocker because the queues of people lining up in advance (the night before) were significantly smaller than they were for iPhone G1. I suppose that makes sense. Most consumers probably thought “well hey, the iPhone is already out and this is just an upgrade so it’s not that big of a deal.” Then when hundreds of people started showing up a few hours before launch I’m sure they realized they had a significant wait ahead of them, and their troubles didn’t end there.
Long lines are great for Apple and AT&T, but technical difficulties are not. During a launch in Denver I recall an Apple Store employee coming out to pump up the crowd while I watched the stream. It was kind of ridiculous now that I think about it, I mean here’s this guy acting like he’s just about to cure cancer when in fact he’s whipping the crowd into a “frenzy” to go spend $200 on a phone with more expensive rates than its predecessor…well, I digress. After getting the crowd worked up the doors were opened at about 8:04AM Denver time and the first wave of 10 or so customers went in the store. Now if you hadn’t been following the news about the iPhone 3G’s launch one big area of skepticism was that, this time around, phones were required to be activated in-store after purchase. That was the plan anyways. As it turned out, 30 minutes after that first wave of customers went in, the same Apple store employee came out and proclaimed to the crowd that he had good news and bad news. “It’s time for a lesson in technology!” he exclaimed. “First off let me say the iPhone 3G is AMAZING. The only problem is that the technology interface for activation, which is wholly unrelated to Apple, is having technical difficulties!” This wasn’t a problem for Denver alone, reports poured in from tons of different Apple stores across the country that phones couldn’t be activated in-store because AT&T’s servers collapsed under the weight of all the new users.
Now if you recall the first iPhone’s launch there was a similar situation. The only difference? Customers were able to activate their phones in the comfort of their own home from behind their computers using iTunes. Sure there were the “This is taking forever!” complaints at the time because the servers were getting hammered, but at least they didn’t have to stand outside in a line for hours while their frustration mounted. Another video stream from an Apple store in San Francisco showed Liana Lehua interviewing the first man in line, a man who waited 36 hours dressed in a suit for his iPhone 3G, who was sent out to pack up his tent without even getting his hands on the phone because of activation problems. Thankfully that wasn’t the case because most stores’ employees started sending customers home with their phone to activate it over iTunes after all. If stores were unable to sell the phone at all it would have been an epic disaster for Apple. All the while you have to expect Steve Jobs is somewhere howling. As I write this post I’m sure there are still thousands of peoples lined up outside of Apple stores waiting to get their iPhone 3G. In fact, some might be leaving the lines at this point out of frustration. Of course this is all just first-day server shock and (hopefully for Apple and AT&T) these problems will have cleared up in a day or two, but you would think they’d have seen this coming?
So otherwise, how is the iPhone 3G? Is it worth all of that heartache? I can’t comment on the full experience as I haven’t seen one. What I did see was Leo Laporte demoing the new App Store which looks awesome. The interface is sweet aside from some confusion about which button to actually click to download an app, and there’s a surprising amount of software available for a first-day release. Apps range in price from free to $75 (the $75 app is aimed at pilots and is a definite outlier, most were $4.99 – $9.99). I’m excited to try it out personally, but for that I think I’m going to stick with an iPod Touch. More on that in the coming week(s). I’ll be interested to see how all of these activation difficulties will play out over the next week. Will people be outraged, or will they simply forget it about it in a day or two? We shall see! Thanks again to Leo Laporte at TWiT Live for providing the coverage I used to write this post.
Now Playing:
The Pogues – Bottle of Smoke
Metal Gear Solid 4 (trying to make my way through again, this time without any kills or alerts)
