After what seems like an eternity of waiting, the iPhone goes on sale in the UK tonight at 6.02pm, in a crafty bit of branding for exclusive operator O2. Shops up and down the land are bracing themselves for an influx of sweaty-palmed iPhone purchasers, with some even queuing in the rain last night to ensure they don’t miss out.
Pocket Picks has our iPhone reserved, so we slept comfortably in our bed last night you’ll be pleased to hear. And we’ve got big plans for Apple’s handset once we lay hands on it by, ooh, 6.05pm. Such as?
1. Hide it from muggers. Scotland Yard has already issued a warning to iPhone owners to not use the device in public (er.. it’s a mobile phone, what happens if you get a call?). But needless to say, we’re already paranoid that the path from our local O2 shop to our front door will be littered with knife-toting gangsters.
2. Let loose some proper American-style whooping as we unbox it. You’ve seen the N64 kid on YouTube. Well, that’ll be us. Except we won’t have our pyjamas on.
3. Do some serious number-crunching. As far as we understand, we won’t have to choose an O2 iPhone tariff until we activate the device on iTunes. Right now, we’re undecided whether to go for the £35, £45 or £55 tariff, so that’ll be our first decision.
4. Upgrade to the latest version of iTunes. If we can do it earlier in the day, we will, but if not, this’ll be the first source of ‘I WANNA PLAY WITH MY IPHONE’ frustration of the evening as we sort it all out (at the same time as tens of thousands of other Brits are downloading the new version).
5. Activate the iPhone and transfer tunes over. The latter half of that may take hours, actually. It’s not the transferring of the tunes that’s the holdup, but more the whittling down our 40GB+ collection into 8GB of stuff for the iPhone. Sadly, Bucks Fizz’s Greatest Hits will probably be first to miss the cut, but we’re Making Our Mind Up (ho ho) about all the others.
6. Do slidey thumb stuff for several hours. Touchscreen mobile interfaces are The Future! The future of not-doing-anything-else-other-than-opening-menus that is. Trust us, we won’t get bored.
7. Find an excuse to pop round to the neighbours and show it off. “Oh, yes it is an iPhone. No, you can’t touch it…”
8. Take some photos. Then look at the quality, and realise we shouldn’t throw out our proper digital camera just yet.
9. Send some emails. Although first, of course, we’ll need to set up our signature with a prominent ‘Sent from my iPhone. Yes, I’ve got an iPhone. *rasp*’ line on the end.
10. Look at all those websites telling you how to hack into the iPhone. Then automatically discount any that mention welding, before deciding that maybe we’re too chicken after all.
11. Cry in a corner after realising you’ve spent at least £900 on a phone with specs that weren’t even cutting edge 2 years ago.
12. Plan to shoot a video about how great it is then cry again at it’s non existant video functionality.
13. Play with safari, very, very slowly. Cry that your kid brothers ‘crappy’ nokia is faster at surfing the web.
As long as you don’t, like, want to send an MMS. Coz you know, it can’t.