Business & Tech

Lined Up For the New iPhone

The hard-core queued up around the block at Suburban Square early Friday morning.

It wasn't exactly the mob scene associated with, say, Springsteen tickets, but even in hard economic times, the at in Ardmore opened early Friday morning to accommodate the faithful iPhone early adapters—100 or more were stretched out in an orderly line around the block on St. James Place and Coulter Avenue to get their brand new iPhone 4S.

At least a couple of them camped out to be first in at 8 a.m. (the store opened two hours earlier than usual), evidenced by cushions and juice bottles on the sidewalk.

Several of those in line at 10 a.m. were happy with the phone's new features, such as "Siri," the "virtual assistant" that includes "crazy good, transformative, category-redefining speech recognition," in the words of New York Times tech critic David Pogue.

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Andre Cleghorn, in town from Brooklyn to see his Ardmore girlfriend Natasha Crayton, said he was looking forward to having Siri as his own personal butler (see video).

But the most popular aspect of the new iPhone seemed to be the fact that it is no longer an AT&T-only item.

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"The iPhone 4S is a world phone," Pogue wrote. "As of Friday, you will be able to buy it from AT&T, Verizon and, for the first time, Sprint ($200, $300 or $400 for the 16-, 32- or 64-gigabyte models). But even if you get your iPhone 4S from Verizon, whose CDMA network is incompatible with the GSM networks used in most other countries, you’ll still be able to make calls overseas, either through Verizon or by inserting another carrier’s SIM card."

Joe Taylor Jr., business manager for the Ardmore Apple Store, said business was brisk two hours after opening, but referred further questions to Apple headquarters.

"People bring their friends, too," Taylor said, on the sidewalk in front of the store, not far from a large urn of Starbucks coffee, which Apple employees were handing out to customers in line.


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