When the iPhone 3G was announced at the WWDC last month, I had the misfortune (or good fortune, depending on how you look at it) of being awake at 5:00am in the morning thanks to a pair of restless children. Making the most of the opportunity, I had a look at Apple's web site and noticed that there were some links to where the iPhone would be available in Australia. Again, as luck would have it, the carrier that currently lugs around my BlackBerry, Optus, was mentioned as a source of iPhone 3G goodness, so I followed a few links [
1] and found myself in what I thought was the privileged position of laying down a $50 holding deposit. Without really knowing what I was getting myself in for, I happily signed up for not one, but two new 3G iPhones. Of course, the fine print doesn't promise anything of the sort (as we will soon see).
I was quite happy with myself for doing this, and there was certainly more than one occasion between then and today when I had gloated (quietly, of course) to friends and family about how I was on a short list to get an iPhone. I only kicked up my gloating ever so slightly when news spread that both Optus
and Vodafone had stopped taking reservations. I though that I was sitting pretty.
However, this is just about when it all started to go pear shaped. After receiving an e-mail from Optus reinforcing my sense of hipness, I was encourged to log onto a special iPhone site, designed only for Optus customers. Perhaps "designed" is overstating the case a little. First of all, I simply could not log on. This was not a load issue, it was (apparently) an "incorrect registration code" issue. I tried again, to no avail, then checked the FAQ, which politely informed me that the problems were "mostly to do with people incorrectly typing in their passwords and registration codes". Sure. The fact that you have to put an entry like that into the FAQ tells me something is wrong, and it's not with the users.
After several failed log in attempts I tried a password reset, and that failed as well. I was starting to get concerned. I shot them off a quick "can you help" e-mail. And guess what? I got not response. Not even an automated one. Hmmm. This is starting to look grim. I tried again the next day (Tuesday of this week), and there you go, I'm in. I wonder if there had been some late night development work behind the scenes ... or was it just that all of the users clued up at the same time? Who knows.
Anyway, what did I get for my efforts? A page that contained details of my deposit. Hot diggity. That was worth the wait.
Apart for the mind blowing 12 point Courier <pre> copy of my deposit, there were some instructions about what to do on iPhone day. The main nugget of advice was to bring a printed copy of the receipt, along with appropriate ID, to the Optus store where you had registered your interest. And it also informed me that I was very, very lucky indeed to be eligible to line up on iPhone Day in the
priority queue. Tops.
To be perfectly honest, I wasn't all that interested in going out of my way
just to get an iPhone on the first day. I would have much preferred to have put in an online order (which I would have been happy to pay for in advance) and then just waited in the comfort of my own home for the thing to arrive. But no, for whatever reason, all of the local Australian telcos have decided that the only way to get an iPhone is to line-up like an knob out the front of a store. Like I've
said before, I'm a fan of Apple kit, but I really don't get all of this product worship crap. The beauty is in the use, not in the worship.
However, in this case, I was on a
priority queue. So off I trundle this morning at about 7am for a nice morning walk up to my nearest Optus phone store. When I get there - perhaps not surprisingly - there was a lineup of about 250 people. Fair enough. But I'm in a
priority queue. As it turns out, no I'm not. In fact, there is no such thing as a priority queue, it's every person for themselves. All 250-odd of them.
And it's right about now that it gets even better. I poked my nose into the front of the queue where there was a pair of Optus phone drones handing out raffle tickets to people in the line and asked them about the
priority queue. Nope. No priority queue. You have to line up. Great. Next bit of news. There are only 5 16GB iPhones in the store. And they were already gone.
At this point, I shrugged my shoulders in disgust and walked off. There was no way - NONE - that I was going to wait in a line with 300 other people (yeah, it'd had grown by 50 people by now) to wait for the opportunity to be
frustrated that I would not be able to get the phone I wanted. So, all I managed to get for my pair of $50 deposits was a nice walk through North Sydney on a crisp but clear winter morning. I'll just have to wait a little bit longer to my hands on an iPhone. The really bizzare thing, however, is that when I checked my credit card transactions after the walk, I noticed that Optus had
already given me a refund on the deposits. Very strange. Perhaps they knew something that I didn't.
The puzzling thing about all this is that it would have to be the complete antithesis of my recent Mac purchase
experience. Traditionally, Apple is an organisation that likes to exert significant control over the entire, end-to-end user experience. And for the most part, that experience is a very, very good one. In my case today, it wasn't. It sucked.
How'd you go with your iPhone quest?
M@
[1] For those of you playing at home, the
Optus website is perhaps only exceeded in its maddening horribleness by the
Telstra BigPond website. For example, the Optus site is so bad, that if your session times out, you have to close the browser before it will let you back in. Both of these organisations are Telcos. I think there's a pattern developing here ...
[2] And to top this all off, we
heard this evening that the first nutter in the queue at the George St Sydney Optus store ... wait for it ...
was an Optus employee. Not a plant, says Optus. No, of course not! On reflection, I'm probably prepared to believe them on this - they couldn't organise a simple
priority queue, so why would I expect them to be able to pull of this stunt? Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence.
