Is That iPhone You Pre-Ordered Really Waiting for You?
By This wouldn’t be the first time, and definitely not the last, but it seems that Best Buy has gone to the legal giberish in their fine print to say this…
“If you have an existing pre-order, it will still be valid. We have stopped all pre-orders due to the demand and inventory concerns. Still, proper expectations need to be set. A pre-order does not guarantee a phone on launch day and this is clearly stated on all pre-order flyers and documentation. It is simply a way of queuing our inventory whenever the store gets their quantities of iPhone 4 inventory. If your place in the pre-order queue is higher than the inventory received for launch, your pre-order will roll over to the second shipment and so on.
That being said, if you pre-ordered early you have a fairly strong chance of getting the phone on launch day. You will hear from the store a few days before launch to schedule an appointment. We will have a better understanding of what inventory we can expect to receive from Apple for launch day around the 22nd or 23rd. So, I encourage everyone to wait until you hear from your store before making assumptions.”
So the question really stands, if your one of the 600,000+ people who pre-ordered the new iPhone, and you got the email notice saying that your welcome to come to the store, will you really be walking into a store and get one without hanging around on the line around the block?
A few users have emailed us and said that they called their stores where the pre-order was scheduled to be picked up and found out that the store didn’t have their name on the list. So now with the delivery date looming in mid July for new pre-orders, they think its better to camp out to get one on launch day. I don’t know about you, but we’ve done our fair share of getting up early only to hang around for a few more hours for our Edge, 3G, 3GS, and iPad’s, and I think this time will end up being no different.
Our suggestion? Don’t camp out (unless you write for a popular iPhone blog that needs the latest and greatest iPhone), call the store you pre-ordered from for pick up and double check your name is on their list, then keep the name of the person who confirmed it on your own list and take that with you!
