TELECOMS & MOBILE
iPhone-mania Irish style
14-03-2008
by Emmet Ryan
iPhone-mania has arrived and it has a distinctly Irish flavour as early sales of the device prove impressive.
Mobile phone stores have been reporting rapid sales of the iPhone yet Irish fans of the device seem to have taken a more sensible approach to their US and UK counterparts by opting against queuing through the night for the phone.
There were few queues to be found around mobile phone stores across the country on Friday morning. O2 Ireland, which has the exclusive Irish rights to the handset, said there was a queue of around 10 people outside its Grafton St store at 8am this morning while the Carphone Warehouse told ENN that there were queues outside some of its stores which opened at 9am but that the branches which opened at 8am had no-one waiting impatiently to get their hands on the device.
The lack of frenzied activity however has failed to slow the pace of sales. "So far sales have been phenomenal. We receive updates every 30 minutes and each half hour the sales are greater than the previous half hour," Stephen Mackarel, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse told ENN.
Mackarel said the iPhone would probably account for 50 percent of all of the firm's handset sales in Ireland on Friday. "Never in the history of mobile phones has a product had that kind of impact on its first day," he said.
Yet if sales of the anointed phone of Cupertino California are so good why did it fail to stir up the hype that preceded its US and UK launches? Pre-orders may play a role as O2 Ireland said it had received a lot of advanced orders for the device, negating the need to queue in the cold. The gap between the US release of the iPhone and the Irish launch may also be a factor. "There has been a nine month interval between the initial launch and the phone becoming available in Ireland," Tony Hanway, customer director with O2 Ireland explained to ENN.
Unsurprisingly, with early sales showing promise O2 Ireland is hoping the messianic mobile can help them to narrow the gap on market leaders Vodafone. "O2 UK has seen plenty of existing customers purchase the iPhone but they have also attracted a lot of users from other networks and we are hopeful that we will see the same patterns emerge in Ireland," said Hanway.
There is likely to be no shortage of handsets in the short term as O2 said there is plenty of stock in the stores at present. The mobile operator said it will monitor sales closely to ensure that stock is replenished as necessary.
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