T-Mobile's Harrow store... without any G1s to demo!

MIR Reader Grant wrote in today to tell me about his T-Mobile UK retail frustrations. He’s been after a G1 and thought he’d have a look at one before possibly buying.

Turns out that’s not possible in Harrow. Over to Grant:

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Hi Ewan,

Today I went out in search of a T-Mobile G1. Not to buy, but to try. After doing lots of research over Christmas I’ve *almost* decided that I want the phone, but before I do so I’d like some hands-on contact. Responsiveness is really important to me, as well as it’s ability to load my most important webpages.

I live in a North London town called Harrow. Harrow is quite big, and we have a large town-centre with lots of shops and lots of busy shoppers. T-Mobile’s shop is really well placed in a great spot in St Georges shopping centre. I got into the store and it was quite active – it seems lots of people were spending their Christmas money on new phones/tariffs. After waiting for a while I got to the front of the queue and asked if they had any T-Mobile G1 demo units. I was bowled over to hear the store assistant tell me that there weren’t.

I then went on a trek across Harrow, visiting 3 Carphone Warehouse stores (yes, they’re like fleas where I live!) and none of them could provide me with a demo unit to look at. I can forgive them mostly – the G1 is a T-Mobile branded device which is probably seen as niche as far as their customer base in concerned.

Why on earth would a T-Mobile store NOT have a G1 unit for prospective customers to use? Particularly when it’s their new, landmark device? The key to the G1 is meant to be it’s useability and you can’t demonstrate that with pretty pictures and big words. Surely getting ONE device out to each of your stores is reasonable, particularly stores in high volume areas (Harrow isn’t exactly the countryside…)? It’s not like they have to replace them, is it?

For now I’m going to be holding off – I want to make sure I’m making a self-informed handset decision. In the meantime, 3UK are likely to call me and offer me further incentive not to leave them. If they offer me a good enough handset-free deal, then I’ll take my business to them and *maybe* eBay a G1 later.

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Grant, what a total arse.

I know just what you were expecting. You reckoned they’d have one or two on display, stuck in those cages or something like that?

I’d have put money on T-Mobile having them available to play with.

Perhaps there’s been a run on G1’s over the Christmas period? You’d expect them to have one or two around in Harrow, North London. Not exactly a remote location…

Has anyone else been out at the shops today browsing or buying?