RSSSeattle: G1s sell out, especially due to short supply
By Angela Gunn | Published October 22, 2008, 4:52 PM
Supplies of T-Mobile G1 phones were short at some stores in the Northwest US, so although customers numbered only a few dozen, at least a few stores could say they sold out by 12 pm PDT, as Angela Gunn reports.
SEATTLE (BetaNews) - 8:00 am comes early for some of us -- in fact, in Seattle in October, the sun's barely up. But today if you snoozed you lose, as those who were not in line in front of the downtown T-Mobile store were out of luck by noon.
Supplies at Seattle's other two official T-Mobile stores were in better shape at midday, though phones were moving out the door at a brisk clip when we visited. An employee at the (relatively hard to find) North Seattle store said that they had approximately 20 customers queued up when they opened the doors at 8:00 am, with about double that crowd reported downtown. Activations were proceeding without incident and took the usual 10-15 minutes.
The customers I saw were evenly divided between current T-Mobile customers and users of other services. Interestingly, the store employee said that he'd noticed very few people coming in only to play with the new handset -- they'd already made up their minds.
Rob Stumpf, who went into a T-Mobile store last week to replace a lost phone and ended up getting on a waiting list for the G1, picked his up over his lunch hour at a reseller north of the city, where he was the fourth G1 buyer. He reported that his new phone attracted positive attention from passers-by, and praised its sound quality and ease of use.
FOR MORE:
- Baltimore: No G1s available at T-Mobile stores, but no lines either by Tim Conneally
- New York: G1 business is brisk, though maybe not booming by Jacqueline Emigh
I bought a G1 today, 10/22, although I did not intend to buy one. I really liked what I saw, being a previous iPhone owner, I wasn't disappointed at all.
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|HERETIC!
;)
Don't you know that once you go Apple, you can *never* go back?
Ooooh....you've gone and done it now. The flames of The Chosen™ will soon rain down upon you.
Best get that flameproof suit on asap.
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|Oh you're in trouble now. I expect foxfyre to be blazing in here at any moment, guns-a-blazing at what an 'idiot' you are for liking something other than an Apple product.
I love my G1. But I found a bug where it can get stuck on contacts from gmail. I had most of them setup with phone numbers an emails (imported from outlook 2007), but I had to add images all over again, and on 1 go it seemed like it would keep syncing but it wouldn't get the image - so it just kept on, for hours. Finally I decided to remove and re-add the image into gmail contacts and that did it.
Also can't connect to my wifi to save my life. My wifi is 'open', with whitelisted MAC addresses but the G1 can't connect to it.
Hopefully the fw update they push this week will fix these things. Otherwise, I love it.
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|Who gives a sh!t about the iPhone or the iPod one way or another?
I get a kick out of the fact that so many define themselves by their cell phone with its outrageously overpriced service plans (all of them, not just the iPhone) and any of the overpriced low-fi MP3 (or similar) format devices.
And you think I am an Apple fanboy just because I would like to be able to use OSX on any platform? Yup, and I just LOVE Apple's strategic planning/marketing and their new underdesigned laptops that fail to keep up with current market developements. LOL!
Oh, but you think because I tire of reading asinine criticisms of Apple by Windows fanboys and others that are often warrantless that I am anything other than tired of posts by such ignorant folks as yourself?
Here's some info sure to confuse you: when any platform does something well, that's great. When they don't, its not great. Regardless of which platform it is! A concept that confuses the hell out of you, doesn't it?
Try reading for meaning sometime, Pre-Cambrian slime mold.
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|Tool, its getting pretty bad when your posts come dangerously close to pandering to the same idiocy as i7.
And his presence is obnoxious enough - especially as he is counterproductive to Apple's interests.
Some of us would like to think that you are better than that...
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|Some of us apparently need to look up sarcasm.
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|Is pre-ordering better?
- Josh
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|I suppose it didn't hurt to reserve one -- Mr. Stumpf's situation was a little unusual, though, since he needed a phone to fill-in for that week since his was lost. (Whereas I would simply fall down and die if I lost my phone; cuts right down on the wait, you see.) Of course, this isn't a Wii situation where there's a tremendous shortage, at least not according to what I heard; the downtown T-Mo, for instance, told me that if I ordered today I could have a G1 in 2-3 days. That's really not bad.
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|Why didn't google hire people to wait in line.... haven't they learned???
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|SKIMORE! I WAS DRINKING COFFEE! My keyboard wants an apology! :-D
Honestly, that occurred to me too (I'm kind of opposed to the whole geeks-line-up thing, personally) -- and I certainly noticed the part where Apple had an iPhone-milestone announcement on tap this morning. Whatev, Cupertino drama junkies. Meanwhile, the line at the North Seattle T-Mo really was pretty mellow to hear them talk about it, and the store staff was in a terrific mood. I think sometimes that those big theatrical lines and hysterics are pretty stressful for the folks inside the store; people get tired of waiting and all too often they get testy. And should you *be* in a foul mood if you have a couple hundred bucks to drop on a new tech toy, and time enough to stand on line to do it?
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