So yeah, braved the launch day line for the first time; took me 15 minutes shy of 12 hours from arrival to posession, at least 2-3 hours of which can be blamed on Rogers' shitty servers crashing and timing out constantly. Anyway, I don't know if it's because it's a newer batch of phones or what, but after picking up my two phones today and activating/restoring them, I spent some time attempting the death grip in a variety of configurations. Here's what I found: Note: This is on the Rogers network. Phone 1 (mine), naked: Can get it to drop 1 bar. I got it to do 2 once, but I couldn't replicate it, so it may have been some passing crosstalk or something. Phone 2 (wife's), full-body shield from Best Skins Ever: No drop at all, no matter what I tried. 5 full bars. So it's possible that either this second batch doesn't have the same problems, or Rogers' signal strength is better than average. Either way, the death grip just doesn't seem to effect Canadian phones nearly as significantly as those in the US. And I'm not the only one. And yes, speed tests confirm; no loss in speed.
Supposedly Apple Stores get their shipments Monday, so since you're in BC that's probably a good time to go. (Monday is a civic holiday here in Ontario, along with as Alberta.) Try it out when you get it though, it'll be interesting to see if it does it for you or not. Apparently folks in Montreal (on Virgin Mobile) can reproduce the problem, and someone else in Toronto can as well. But for the most part it appears most people are having few to no issues. Go Canada!
I've heard that people who decide to wait after the weekend rush to get their iPhone 4 may have to wait for another month before a new batch comes out, because they are expected to be sold out within the next few days in Australia.
Were they doing anything special? At the I was at they were passing out copious amounts of coffee and bottled water, and passed out cupcakes from Timothy's several times. Cupcakes! They weren't bad, but it would have been cool if they passed out slices of pizza or something, considering most of us didn't have anything to eat all day. Not that I'm complaining; I just saw someone run off to get some pretty awesome looking pizza from Richtree while I was in line.
One of the launch events saw people being escorted from the store to a ritzy hotel for a huge party until it was their turn to buy a phone, at which point they were taken to the store to complete the purchase, and then taken back to the party again
Wow. Jeez, why couldn't they do something like that here? As I got towards the front of the store all they did was start calling out "buy outright" (unlocked) customers into the store ahead of others, which started pissing people off and causing the crowd to get a little rowdy. (It sort of made sense since Rogers and Fido's servers were crashing/timing out most of the time, and Bell and Telus were slow as molasses, so unlocked purchases were quick in 'n out deals.) They stopped that practise by the time I was at the front of the line because security was threatening to disperse the crowd entirely if they didn't settle down and just went in order no matter what people were buying. But there was a certain degree of amusement in the older lady several people behind me who, every time an Apple dude asked for the next buy outright customer, she kept hopping up and down and saying "Ooh, ooh, ooh!" with her hand up. She sounded uncannily like a monkey.
