Just posted these words about the whole sorry iPhone situation to my Google+ and will post to my Blog later - thought you might want to have a read... If there's the desire for it from you guys, I'll post my other updates, including correspondence with the CEO's office at O2 throughout the week and today, later too.
"So, the iPhone 5 is out today. Many people will currently be tucking into their newfound gizmatrons of wonderment with the gaze of a young child being handed his most eagerly anticipated gift on Christmas morning.
But a number of O2 customers won't be, it seems.
O2 were late to the game last Friday (pre-order open day), opening up pre-orders very late in the evening, when most providers had been selling for the entire day already. The O2 community forums were an interesting read with lots of information being granularly fed and customers getting irate as their anxiousness to order through their provider grew.
All the while, O2's customer services, online chat Guru's and various other departments were apparently just giving whatever information they could seemingly make up by sticking their finger in the air and wiggling it around to channel the great god of bullcrap.
No two conversations were the same, no bits of information matched and nobody appeared to have a clue what was happening.
O2 eventually opened pre-orders and the floodgates were more or less broken down immediately as the masses flooded to place their orders.
One of the best bits of information came from a news post on O2's website, posted a full 24-hours after most other people had been able to pre-order their shiny new handsets, here: http://news.o2.co.uk/2012/09/15/the-iphone-5-is-coming/
One part of that post which many have read and believed (and still exists, and is still being referred to even right now by the @O2 twitter account and some of the customer services team and O2 online chat 'gurus'!), was this:
Q: When will my iPhone 5 pre-order be delivered?
A: If we get your pre-order before 4pm the day before launch, we’ll get it to you on launch day. The only exception to this will be those customers with an address in the Highlands and Islands.
So... you could pre-order right up until 4pm on the Thursday and still receive on the Friday launch day! That seems too good to be true! It is...
The O2 community forums (and other forums, for that matter) are awash with people complaining that they are not getting their pre-orders on Launch Day, today. Their informaton is coming from a mixture of things, such as the order status in their online accounts not changing from the ubiquitous 'In Progress' for pre-orders (where others are getting tracking information instead), conversations with O2 chat gurus and by calling up to ask.
An interesting thread to follow is this one on the O2 forums, currently standing at well over 130 pages and towards the end having LOTS of people angry with the service and misinformation being disseminated: http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Apple-iOS-Devices-iPhone-iPad/My-iPhone-5-Has-Been-Dispatched/td-p/2909...
This second thread follows a similar format: http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Apple-iOS-Devices-iPhone-iPad/Official-Pre-ordered-but-no-show/td-p/297...
And there are many other threads to boot, not to mention some of the tweets being posted to @O2 currently!
What's worse is that seemingly there is no rhyme or reason amongst the orders that are being sent out - it certainly seems that it isn't a 'first-come-first-served', as you'd expect. Some who ordered as soon as pre-orders opened are reporting that they aren't receiving theirs, whilst others who ordered days later are celebrating the fact that theirs has arrived. A very confusing and annoying situation, frustrations which are only escalating as I type this...
I've had my own annoyances with O2 throughout this saga too, which I'll not post here yet (I'll post separately later), but I am in dialogue with a chap in the CEO's office there, who currently seems oblivious to the problems and pretty much denies there's anything wrong. Being the kind soul I am, I have offered to collate some evidence for him... I'll update that all later, along with my other complaints to him too."
