I Phone5 Records
The launch drew crowds of customers at Apple stores worldwide.
Hundreds of people lined up around the block at Apple’s store on New York City’s swanky Fifth Avenue.
Kadijah Perez, 26, a Bronx resident, had not heard about the map issues. She said she wanted to use the phone for navigation, adding, “Hopefully, they’ll just fix it.”
In Annapolis, Maryland, customers settled in lawn chairs waiting for the Apple store in Westfield Annapolis Mall to open. A man walking by quipped: “I’m beginning to believe (Mitt) Romney. The economy is bad. People are starving.”
Waiting in line for anything was a first for Annapolis resident Robert Delarosa, 37, who skipped buying the iPhone 4 due to bad reviews but is now tired of his iPhone 3GS.
“I’m stuck with this old 3GS, a Flintstone phone,” he said.
In London’s central Regent Street, about 1,300 people lined up to buy the iPhone 5, nearly twice as many as showed up for the previous iPhone.
The iPhone 5 “is both the fastest and biggest selling iPhone to date on our network. Pre-order sales are up more than 50 percent compared to the iPhone 4S,” a Vodafone UK spokesman said.
In Germany, 19-year-old musician Okan Yasin had waited since lunchtime on Thursday to be at the front of the queue at the Frankfurt Apple shop. Proudly holding a sign saying “Ich bin Nummer 1″ (I am Number 1), he said:
“I just need to have it. I know that the new iPhone from a new features perspective hardly has anything extra to offer. But I just needed to be here. It’s the hype, man!”
In Australia, about 600 people queued around the block at the Apple store in Sydney, the first in the world to hand over an iPhone 5 to a buyer. Customers were limited to buying a maximum of two phones.
In Tokyo, the lines stretched several blocks.
“It’s thin and light. I’ve used Samsung before, but the operation, the feeling, of the iPhone is better,” said Wataru Saito, a semiconductor engineer who had been queuing in Tokyo since mid-afternoon on Thursday – with his suitcase, as he had a flight to catch on Friday.
In Hong Kong, people carrying rucksacks filled with cash waited outside the city’s main Apple store, hoping to snap up phones for resale. Staff there chanted “iPhone 5, iPhone 5.”
Agustin Sanchez, 19, wanted to be among the first, so he showed up at 4 a.m. In his hand he clutched a ticket to buy an iPhone 5, whose availability coincided with the opening of this, the 250th Apple Store in the United States.
In August, Samsung Galaxy S III outsold Apple iPhone 4S in the US market for the first time ever in the previous quarter.
