The high demand for the Apple iPhone 3G has left O2 a little short; it has outstripped supply and O2. The exclusive UK Mobile phone partner (O2) said that they have run out of stock which you can clearly see on their website.
Customers who want to pre-order the iPhone 3G before it goes on sale this Friday flocked in by the masses and this led O2 to run short on supply.
The Apple iPhone 3G was available yesterday from 8am on the O2 website and many customers who wanted to pre-order crashed the site within one hour and this was down to a huge volume of traffic, and by yesterday afternoon O2 said it had run out of pre-order stock.
Carphone Warehouse who are the only independent retailer in the UK to stock the device says that they still have stocks available to new O2 customers who wish to pre-order it, but and a big but existing customers who wish to upgrade an O2 mobile phone for the new iPhone will now have to wait until Friday.
Some of O2’s rivals are speculating that the company limited supply in order to add to the hype of Friday’s launch, which could possibly be true, who knows. However O2 maintains that half the phones they ordered were made available for pre-order customers. It has given no details of how many phones it expects to stock in total.
A staggering 200,000+ people registered an interest in the 3G iPhone compared with 35,000 people registered interest in the previous version of the phone before it went on sale
The 8GB version of the new phone — which can store about 2,000 songs — is free for customers willing to sign up for a year and a half at £45 per month, while the larger capacity 16GB phone is free for anyone on a £75-per-month deal.
Source – O2
As I was one of those who tried to order the iPhone online since 8AM, I can say that the o2 website had already technical problem dealing with the high volume of traffic at 8.05. In fact I hardly believe they sold any Iphone at all as all the times I tried to place an order thoughout the day I would get an error. At one stage I managed to get to the credit card details stage and once submitted the order I got another error! Unless O2 manage to produce a website able to cope with this kind of traffic, we should just rely on the oldfashioned queue outside the shop!