And so I woke up at 9.30am on Saturday, 23 August 2008. Saturday – a day that I can sleep in, a day that I can have a lazy morning before heading off to church. But no. Saturday, 23 August 2008 was to be a special Saturday that I had to get up early, shower, change, and head down to ComCentre at Exeter Road. Why?
All because I have reserved the iPhone 3G and have made an “appointment” to purchase it that morning at 11am.
So I took the train down and I was expecting a looooong queue when I got there. But surprisingly, the queue was relatively short and moved along pretty quickly. Took me all of an hour to get through the queue and get the iPhone in my hands. But I must say that the queue was very orderly and SingTel even handed out refreshments in the form of pack of chips and a bottle of water for those in the queue. All in all, a pretty good experience.
SingTel build a temporary structure that looked a bit like the Apple Store on New York City’s 5th Avenue. So all the iPhone related transactions took place within that structure. 50 counters were available within the “cube”. Once I got in, I was at a counter within one minute. The only not-so-good thing was that activation of the iPhone was slow, probably because of the amount of traffic being generated. The guy serving me even suggested that maybe Apple only had one activation server. But I was in pretty good spirits and just waited patiently for all the necessary paperwork and transactions to be performed.
A quick personal review of the iPhone 3G. Whatever you have read in the reviews hold. Even the much talked-about 3G reception problem is true. This morning, when I came into the office, the 3G reception dropped to nothing, when previously, on my Nokia N70, the reception was full. Switching to 2G will help a lot. It brought my reception up to full. And it is definitely a fingerprint magnet. Can’t wait till I get my Invisible Shied, which, in my opinion, is the best screen protector around. Check it out here.
To summarize, the iPhone is not that bad a product. The keyboard does take getting used to but after a while, you can type pretty quickly. I hope there’s a proper solution to the 3G reception problem. It may not be noticed much in the USA, but in Asia and Australia, 3G is big and coverage is pretty much everywhere. So Apple, please buck up on this!! Haha, as if Apple would read my blog.
Until the next time, cheers… :Þ