Apple's iPhone to hit stores, hundreds line up
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SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK  - Hundreds of gadget fans, or their paid stand-ins, lined up on Friday to be the first buyers of Apple Inc.'s iPhone, a music and video playing phone that seeks to reshape the mobile industry.
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The most eagerly awaited cell phone ever is upon us Friday. Should you resist the iPhone's breathless hype, or take the plunge? Unless you're already standing in line outside an Apple or AT&amp;T store, or are prepared to mug one of the first customers to come out after the 6 p.m. launch, the answer, at least for now, will have to be "let me think about it for a week or two."
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Apple hit its target for iPhone shipments a few weeks ahead of schedule, and one analyst thinks the price cut accounted for more than 100,000 sales last week and into the weekend.
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Tech-heads camped overnight outside Apple electronics stores in US cities aiming to be the first to own an iPhone, marketed as the coolest gadget on the planet, when they go on sale Friday.
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The number of iPhones manufactured by Apple may not be enough to meet customer demand when the smart phone goes on sale tomorrow, CEO Steve Jobs said.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. Â Apple Inc.'s delayed update to the Mac OS X operating system is hitting store shelves as consumers are increasingly snapping up Macintosh computers to complement their iPods and iPhones.
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By Leslie Cauley  For consumers eager to get their hands on an Apple iPhone, here's the good news: It will be available in all 1,800 AT&T phone stores at 6 p.m. sharp on June 29.
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No list of trends would be complete without a mention of Apple's iPhone, a device that many handset manufacturers will be looking to beat in 2008 in order to attract a consumer that is ever more interested in advanced wireless services. Many of those devices will debut at CES next week.
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LONDON - Apple Inc. took its million-selling iPhone trans-Atlantic yesterday: Chief executive Steve Jobs said it will go on sale in Britain Nov. 9.
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Apple's much-anticipated iPhone will hit US stores on 29 June, at a cost of $499 for the entry product.
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SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK  - Thousands of U.S. gadget fans flocked to stores on Friday to be the first buyers of Apple's iPhone, a music-playing and Web-browsing device expected to shake up the mobile industry.
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Customers eager to buy the cellphone had waited in long lines in front of Apple stores in New York and other cities.
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SAN ANTONIO - Customers clamoring to get their hands on Apple Inc.'s highly anticipated iPhone better make sure they're at the right store.  The combination cell phone, media player and wireless Web device will only be sold at stores owned by Apple Inc.
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(InfoWorld) - When Apple launches the iPhone on Friday, it is set to get a jump on its competitors and spark a flurry of new phone designs, regardless of how well the device actually sells. By introducing a combined smartphone, mobile e-mail platform, and MP3 music player with a touchscreen interface, Apple has sent other hardware vendors running back to their drawing boards. And the company has enjoyed positive press coverage since CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January, analysts said. Apple is feeding the fire with strong advertising in its retail stores. On Monday, staffers at the Apple store in the Cambridgeside Galleria mall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wore black T-shirts with the logo "the wait is almost over," printed above an image of a calendar page for Friday, June 29. iPhone anticipation has already created a "halo effect" of increased sales for Apple's notebook and desktop PCs, an impact that is likely to increase after the launch, according to a report from ChangeWave Research. Apple posted a strong profit for the last period despite struggling with a U.S. federal investigation into executives backdating their stock options. In April,Â Apple beat Wall Street expectations by posting a profit of $770 million for the second quarter, an 88 percent rise from that period last year. Because the company has already garnered media attention and a sales boost from iPhone demand, Apple will suffer little damage even if the device is a flop in retail sales, one analyst said. "No way Apple will seriously impact Nokia or Motorola or Samsung, who combined sell over a billion phones a year. But if Apple manages to sell several million, then that is probably pretty good for their overall business," said analyst Jack Gold, founder of the research firm J. Gold Associates. "I think the potential gold mine is in the services, not the phone hardware." The iPhone will bring new subscribers to Apple's iTunes online music store, and Apple could make more money if it decides to launch future wireless mobile products like navigation, location-based services, VoIP telephony, and video streaming, Gold said. In the meantime, Apple has already given a headache to competitors scurrying to catch up, such as Motorola, Samsung, and LG Electronics. Even vendors with comparable products -- like Nokia's N Series and High Tech Computer's HTC Touch phones -- lack Apple's cachet and will have trouble competing on store shelves, he said. In fact, some experts are warning that iPhone sales could fall short of Apple's high expectations. Their criticism includes potential user confusion about Apple's "virtual keyboard," a battery that may fade too fast and is not user-replaceable, andÂ resistance by some corporate IT departmentsÂ to the added expense and security risk of supporting mobile e-mail networks in addition to the servers they use to support Research in Motion's BlackBerry device. Those drawbacks could limit the iPhone's success in the business market, said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research. Still, the iPhone will be popular with those who tend to use smartphones more by scrolling through menus than typing long messages and who have made Apple's iPod music player a huge hit despite similar concerns about its battery, Wu said. Likewise, consumers will likely shrug off corporate security concerns and use mobile e-mail systems from GoogleÂ and Yahoo. In the long run, Apple will use the iPhone to beat its competitors in creating an end-to-end channel for digital media, spanning from Mac PCs to the mobile iPod music player, iTunes online store, and Apple TV set-top box for sharing Internet and television video content. The only thing Apple could do to spread that net even wider would be to offer iPhone models at less than the current $499 for a 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB, Wu said.
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AT&T said over the weekend that it had nearly sold out of its entire stock of iPhones, while Apple Stores were reportedly not far behind. An analyst with Piper Jaffray said that 500,000 phones had been sold nationwide over the weekend.
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Consumers planning to buy the iPhone at the end of the month will need an iTunes Store account to activate the device.
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While the masses swarmed Fifth Ave, the iPhone's true success will be decided by the rest of America. Whether in rural Virginia, central Pennsylvania, or small-town Indiana, crowds turned out to be the first to own Apple's new device.