Only a Few Dozen iPhones in UK's O2 and Carphone Warehouse Locations

"Demand was at 13,000 orders per second."

Wow. Thats just amazing.

Too late to buy online!!!

Check out the Reuters story

"Demand was at 13,000 orders per second."

Wow. Thats just amazing.

yeah, holy crap!!!

Yeah, here you go, either O2's is just saying this to whip up excitement for friday, or the numbers are true and both Apple (with stocking the UK) or O2 have really ballsed this up royaly. Why is it we're getting f**ed about with this released. Im buying a 1st gen, sod O2 and Apple.

I hope people down on Wall Street are reading this -- 13000 orders per second!! AAPL is going to skyrocket!

Clearly, O2 should have tried a lottery system instead.

I think the 13,000 was server requests or peak load. Or most of us clicking refresh 2000 times since none of us could get through!

I'm worried about Friday. Apple will be selling iPhones to new customers only, so presumably as a non-iPhone but current O2 contract holder I can't use them. There are only a dozen or so Apple Stores in London, most of which are in shopping centres, and I would imagine that if any store has an overnight queue it will be the flagship store on Regents Street. There are many more O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores but I worry that units will be spread far more thinly across these.

I'm taking the gamble of taking the first tube to one of the less central O2 stores and hoping that there won't be too many people there. I could quite easily see people coming out of clubs in the centre, seeing some queues and then thinking they could get a piece of the action.

I'm going to swing by my intended O2 store on Thursday night to confirm that they will be open and expecting units, and to check that a line has not already formed! There are going to be a lot of disappointed people on Friday, not to mention many weeks to come.

I'm planning on swinging leisurely by an Apple store this Friday to get my new iPhone 3G, didn't expect there'd be any lines this time around. But now that I think about it, I've heard from several of my friends that they're going to be first-time iPhone buyers... which could indicate a lot more demand out there than I figured.

I hope they don't run out of stock here in the US, too!! I guess at least I've got my iPhone 2.5G to keep using for a while if they do.

Ok, 13,000 per second is a lot; fair play. BUT, they MUST have known that if they text 100,000 customers at 8am, a load of them are gonna go straight onto their computers and try and order an iphone... I think they're even bigger idiots now as they've said they didn't have any idea they would get that response... Why? Why didn't they think they'd get that response, did they think the 100,000 people who signed up to get a text message were just kidding??!

If they wanted to protect their servers and limit the number of simultaneous orders they could have a) staggered the text messages randomly throughout the day or b) did a soft launch and simply relied on word of mouth to spread the news that you could order online... At least that way the phones would have gone to the "faithful" ;)

As for O2 stores only having a few dozen iphone's on launch day; the cynical side of me thinks "yeah right, just another way to whip everyone up into a frenzy", but the pessimistic side of me thinks "oh great; we're getter short-changed / shafted yet again...."

I honestly don't know what to think now... I'm tempted to just hang onto my gen 1 for a while and order the 3g model in a few weeks online, and in the meantime just have fun with the app store until my phone arrives.

I'm afraid the whole 6 hours of O2 online crap i went through has taken the edge off my excitement about this launch.... This is all just starting to smell of corporate BS....

I don't think O2 are being honest with their customers in ANY way whatsoever. I just wish i could just order straight from Apple, i trust them (rightly or wrongly)...

i put my card details in but nothing loading after so i'm not too sure whats going to happen i probably didn't get through. But I'm not happy as i though as a current iphone user i was garanteed a new iphone reserved thats what my text from o2 says!?

I live in street so i hope the tiny o2 shop gets some iphones and they have some left!