Well what a total let down! It was far from buzzing at the O2 Experience Store on Grafton Street today. There were a fair few people who were clearly buying iPhones, and a few more swooning over the ones on display. One delightfully old dear was being shown the "locate me" feature in the Maps app, and she nearly dropped dead when it showed her the current location. At least she could have auto-sent coordinates to the emergency services.
It was a strange sort of event. For some unknown reason they decided that flame throwers, a man on stilts and a girl with a crystal ball were apt for the launch. It was entertaining, but seemed to directly go against Apple's design policy! In fact, while drooling over the window display (two extra-large "functioning" iPhones), we were told several times to move by some woman, whose only job seemed to be to ensure that nobody ended up being set alight.
To make matters worse, my own iPhone decided to die (I hadn't charged it) so I ended up not being able to take any photos! John, however took a few with his Moto Slivr; not the best resolution, but I've added them anyway:
The mighty banner above the O2 Experience Store. I need to get this!
I think you can just about make out the flame-thrower here!
Erm...well...the O2 Store!
The giant iPhone in the window!
The Carphone Warehouse (the only other place allowed to sell the iPhone in Ireland) had a similar sort of crowd, although they opted for a DJ, rather than O2's cirque de flambé.
Now, enough with the brief overview of the launch, and onto specifics. The following essentially confirms what had been established in this earlier post:
1. One cannot buy an iPhone unless they take the contract there and then. In fact, John was laughed at, and given a "knowing look" when he asked. There is no way around this. Even lying and saying "I'm buying it as a gift, and I'll tell the person to come in and get the contract with you next week" doesn't work...we tried it.
2. iPhone contracts can not be taken by "foreign" (or as they called it "illegal") iPhones. Do I need to say any more about this? I think I've done it to death on my blog at this stage.
3. The iPhone remains overpriced here, and the contract/price plans/tarrifs are horrendous. In fact, we pay more here for the phone and the contract than any other official country, and we get a shameful 1GB of data per month (vs. unlimited) and NO Visual Voicemail.
In addition:
1. O2 customer service is unfriendly if you question them on any point. They also seem to think it's fine to be patronising if you ask a reasonable question.
2. O2 Ireland CEO, Danuta Gray, was nowhere to be seen. Shame. I guess she didn't need to be there, since, as she previously described, she already had an iPhone; presumably a "foreign" one too, given it only came out today.
Oh, and if you want to see some more photos, then check out this flickr feed. It comes courtesy of Ireland in Beta
3 comments:
Do they take you through the activation process in the store?
Are you still going to try an o2 sim card?
Have you heard anything about how the sales are going? I've done a quick search on google but couldn't find anything relevant.
"we pay more here for the phone and the contract than any other official country"
I have an Irish iPhone and the tariff seems reasonable compared to other Irish (especially o2 and Vodafone) plans.
German plans:
€49 for 100 minutes, 40 texts, 39 cents per minute, 19 cents per text
€69 for 200, 150, 39 cents, 19 cents
€89 for 1000, 300, 29 cents, 19 cents
Of course they have free (I think) voice mail and no data limit. I don't know whether voice mail is traditionally free in Germany or not (it could be included in the minutes) and I have heard that they do have a data limit but don't advertise it.
Either way, the Irish iPhone tariff compares well against other Irish plans and German iPhone plans.
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