iPhone 5 chase

I woke up this morning at 6:30a.m. to drive from the west to the airport to queue for the iPhone 5. I reached there at 7:30a.m., 30 minutes before the M1 store opens only to join the queue as the 90th person or so. 

It was pretty hard for me to get a phone because I didn't register my interest with M1, so I didn't have a priority booking slip. Basically, I was called a walk-in customer. I wouldn't have moved over to M1 if it was not for Starhub's terrible reservation service yesterday. I logged in at 3 p.m only to spend the next 3 hours refreshing the site constantly because of the overload in traffic. In the end, I had to read off an entry on their Facebook customer care service by a member of public that the iPhone 5 had sold out.

So while M1 tended to everyone in the queue, I sat around to wait for leftovers. Frankly, I didn't know if I was going to leave the airport with one because there was nearly 200 people in the queue! A friend told me to wait till 10 and when the time came, I got up and checked if they had leftovers. In fact, they did for the 16GB!! The phones have all been reserved already and I will be going back later to get mine with my dad.

Curious, I also drove to Changi City Point to check if there was leftovers at the M1 store. Nope, everything had been snapped up. So being a Starhub customer, I tried standing in the queue for the iPhone too. I was 14th in line at 10:30 a.m., 30 minutes away from the opening time at 11a.m.. And actually, if I stayed on, I would have gotten an iPhone because they had about 50 sets for walk in customers at that outlet. A few of us got talking and I even had an offer to sell my 3GS to someone instead of trading it in! 

So, I benefitted much from the M1 traditional system of queuing. But next time when the next iPhone launches, I hope they'd have a good online reservation system unlike Starhub's so that I won't have to queue ;P