On July 30th, the iPhone 4 was officially released in Canada! I know many friends of mine actually drove down to the US to buy an unlocked phone… Either way, the country is filled with anticipation for the new iPhone and its allegedly crippled antenna system. I called many stores only to find out the phone was sold-out after a few hours it was put on the shelves.
I came home to check people’s feedback on RedFladDeals, only to find many people selling their newly purchased iPhone 4s for twice as much as Apple is! Also, users confirmed that the “death grip” exist in Canada as well. Clearly, Apple did not make any hardware revisions to address the issue, at least not for this batch of phones. People were also concerned about the long wait to activate their phones on Rogers/Fido system. Their service kept crashing and people reported line-ups and wait times of 10 hours + at Apple Stores. Apple online store has a 3 week ETA for order and finally to make the situation worse, Fido and Rogers are directing people to local stores to buy the phone. They are not willing to take order over the phone anymore…
I have to say. This is all too much hype for a phone that is reportedly crippled by design. It is also obvious that the initial launch was affected by the limit stock the stores had. Could this mean Apple is pushing out the initial crippled batch and shipping in new ones? One can only guess…
Update: It appears that since launch date no stores in the country other than Apple themselves have been getting more shipments of iPhones. Rogers reported to receive a shipment that was ready to go on sale today (Saturday, Aug 7th). However, nobody has reported seeing any stock at Rogers stores… so the iPhone shortage continues…
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