There’s been a buzz going around in the tech world lately because of hopes and dreams of something “magical.”
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the new iteration of the “Jesus Phone,” the iPhone 4, to the world last Monday at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.
Now, as The Daily Reveille’s tech columnist, I feel it’s my duty to inform my loyal readership of some of the fancy, new things iPhone 4 brings to the table. Features such as: a full HD display, HD video recording, application multitasking, a 5MP camera with flash, ridiculous battery life and, of course, face-to-face video calling.
I mean, you can even play Farmville on the new iPhone — what else do you want?
However, since a lot of you reading this column have an iPhone and have heard about the new one from your friends, family or simply from browsing the Internet like myself, I won’t bore you with my humble opinion of the new phone.
Instead, I have something more pertinent to those interested in buying Steve Jobs’ latest new toy.
With the phone going on sale next Thursday and pre-orders starting two days ago, one would think with all the new features iPhone 4 brings over last year’s 3GS model, a company as big and mighty as AT&T would expect a large volume of customers ready to pre-order the new phone.
Expecting this mass traffic, it would make sense to do everything possible to prep the servers so nothing disastrous or fatal may happen, right?
Well, this is still AT&T we’re talking about — and, like their network in Baton Rouge last Friday, things crashed hard and heavy.
Numerous problems were reported during day one of iPhone’s pre-order.Many interested customers claimed someone else’s information would show up when they logged into their AT&T accounts.
This causes huge concern because if someone else’s information were to show up if I logged into my account, who gets to see all of my private information when they log into their account?
This security breach follows shortly after AT&T leaked 114,000 iPad 3G user’s emails.
On top of users signing in to see someone else’s user information, some customers claimed they received confirmation emails providing a date when they would receive their new iPhone, when John Smith in Ohio was the one who ordered it.
This seems like a big problem with AT&T.
Many stores also reported problems with pre-orders. Many customers waited upward of three hours for their order to go through after dealing with many error messages on AT&T’s system.
Soon thereafter, many AT&T stores actually closed their doors and halted pre-orders altogether. It’s expected to have a slow server or even have it crash during the day because of high volume, but to have this major of a security breach occur not only with the 3G iPads earlier this month, but now with iPhone 4 pre-orders — to reiterate, something everyone knew would be a huge event — is ridiculous.
While AT&T failed to address this issue Tuesday, the company issued a statement mere minutes before I started typing this column yesterday.”Given this unprecedented demand and our current expectations for our iPhone 4 inventory levels when the device is available June 24, we’re suspending pre-ordering today in order to fulfill the orders we’ve already received. The availability of additional inventory will determine if we can resume taking pre-orders.”
So, it sounds like if you were one of the lucky few to get in there and pre-order your phone before the servers blew up … congratulations. Hopefully you’ll be enjoying your new phone next Thursday on launch day.
To those who didn’t, keep trying. Apple’s website (as of this writing) claims phones will begin shipping July 2.
However, to those whose pre-orders did go through, double- and triple-check and make sure the information on your account is correct and your phone is being shipped to you, not some lonely guy in Albuquerque.
AT&T needs to get its act straight. I wouldn’t trust a carrier who has this many internal and cellular network problems, no matter how much ol’ Steve hyperbolizes about the iPhone.
—-Contact Adam Arinder at [email protected].