At 8AM UK
time on Friday the 14th of September pre orders officially began for the new
iPhone 5. Apple were hoping to ship devices to customers on the 21st of
September but only those lucky enough to get their order in within one hour of
the phone going live were offered this date. Many others were faced with the
prospect of a 2-3 week delay on the phone due to the high demand, meaning their
handset would be likely to arrive in early October. It is estimated that
between 1.3 and 1.5 million orders had been placed during the first hours and
these guesses may be a touch on the conservative side. Analysts predict that
before 2012 is over Apple will have shipped over 30 million of these new
phones, out stripping the iPhone 4S which sold 1 million units and the six
hundred thousand achieved by the iPhone 4. This high demand has also led some
experts to predict that the iPhone 5 may indeed sell more than the some total
of all other iPhone’s ever released.
Despite many industry experts and insiders commenting that
the phone lacks a real “knockout” feature the public have not been put off this
new model. The high demand is being met with an aggressive roll out of the new
phone which will see the device launched in nine key markets simultaneously.
These include the US, UK and Japan. One week after this first
wave another 22 countries can expect to greet the phone with the handset
available in over one hundred markets before the end of the year.
The iPhone 5 looks set to become the most popular iPhone of
all time and quite possibly the most popular phone ever released. Early delays
in shipments already illustrate just how high the demand for this phone
actually is.