Carphone sees x10 interest in iPhone pre-registrations

If you’ve been reading Ben’s tale of woe trying to register to get a 3G iPhone from o2, earlier, then this piece of news is, as Kylie used to sing, especially for you.

Carphone Warehouse, the nation’s behemoth mobile phone retailer, is ready and waiting to take your orders online, right now at www.carphonewarehouse.com/iphone.

If, incidentally, you’d like to pick up an iPhone in person, no trouble. Head along to your local store this coming Friday at precisely 8.02am (did you see what they did there? Nice!) and they’ll be ready to help.

In fact, I’m going to see if we can place our very own contributor (and he with the RFID chip in his arm) Dan Lane in a Carphone Warehouse store for the morning of Friday 11th to cover the shenanigans.

You’d do well to get in there early and place your order online — Carphone are reporting a ten-fold increase in pre-registrations over the old iPhone launch last year. Exciting times.

o2, Carphone and Apple will, of course, be doing their best to hook in the zealot mobile fanboys and girls with 18 month contracts. A little while later — just in time for Christmas — expect to be able to get hold of an iPhone on a Pay As You Go basis. Good policy this, from the point of view of the fanboys who’ll be able to lord it over everyone for a good few months before the great unwashed consider grabbing hold of one.