Early buyers of Apple's latest iPhone once again slammed servers and brought down stores, though some handled the demand with aplomb.
Apple's online store in France handled iPhone 5 orders with no trouble, but not all e-commerce sites handled the load so gracefully.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)The iPhone 5 hiccuped onto the market today, with a smooth pre-order process at some sites but unresponsive servers elsewhere.
In the United States, early buyers found the store sections on both Apple and AT&T's sites down for maintenance. Savvy users discovered that orders could still be placed through Apple's iOS app, where buying options went live immediately after midnight. Meanwhile, Verizon's site appeared to be fully functional, unlike Sprint's which spent its first half hour at a crawl when trying to view the ordering page.
"It's coming," Sprint's store page read. "We're excited and readying the store for your orders. Check back soon to place your pre-order."
Apple's online stores in the U.K., Germany, and France responded smoothly to pre-order requests. Curiuosly, Apple's online store in the United States worked smoothly from France but wasn't available from California in CNET's attempts to get through.
In Germany, servers at Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division were sluggish to respond, but a pre-order page was available. Trying to place an order, though, was a different matter: the Web page wouldn't load.
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"A communication error occurred," the T-Mobile Germany site said. "The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time."
In the U.K., Orange's online store went offline. T-Mobile UK (the other half of the Everything Everywhere partnership that will have the LTE advantage in the U.K.) offered an iPhone 5 pre-order button, but on its online store, the iPhone 5 wasn't yet actually available.
The sixth-generation phone is thinner, longer, lighter, and comes with a faster processor and faster LTE wireless networking. And it comes with greater sales ambitions: Apple is releasing it for sales in more countries sooner. Some analysts expect that faster sales ramp will mean more revenue for Apple in the fourth quarter of 2012.
But keeping up with demand for the tremendously popular product is tough.
Last year's iPhone pre-orders got off to a shaky start. Apple's own online store experienced intermittent errors shortly after sales began at midnight Pacific, steadying about 45 minutes later. The company's carrier partners experienced more substantial hiccups, with AT&T and Sprint buyers reporting delays of up to two hours while trying to purchase a handset.
This year, many sites didn't even try to keep up. Vodafone Germany only offered a sign-up page to get more information on the phone.
That was a common occurrence elsewhere, too. In France, SFR, Bouygues Telecom, and Orange only showed pages where people could sign up to find out about availability.
Likewise, O2 in the U.K. offered information but no pre-order page for the iPhone 5.
This is Apple's second time launching on three of the largest carriers in the U.S. at once. Before the iPhone 4S, Apple only dealt with AT&T. Last year the company brought both Verizon and Sprint into the fold with the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S respectively.
Apple sold more than 4 million iPhones during its launch weekend last year, nearly twice the 1.7 million iPhone 4 models sold in the same period in 2010. In 2009, Apple sold about 1 million iPhone 3GS'.
Part of the reason for the larger numbers last year was not just the growth of the smartphone market, but also that Apple was offering it on more carriers, and in more countries. The 4S was available in seven countries initially, and the iPhone 5 is available in those same seven, plus two more -- Hong Kong and Singapore.
The iPhone means a lot to AT&T: the carrier devoted its entire home page to a countdown timer for the start of iPhone 5 pre-orders.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
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