After getting off to a rocky start early Tuesday morning, Apple opened its online store for iPhone 4 pre-orders. The pre-order program began earlier in the morning, but was hampered by issues that eventually let to the familiar “We’ll be back soon” at the company’s online store.
Apple introduced the iPhone 4 during Steve Jobs’s keynote presentation at the company’s World Wide Developer Conference on June 7 with the promise that the company would begin accepting pre-orders on the 15th and release the new combination iPod and smartphone on the 24th.
Order errors were common Tuesday morning.
The new iPhone sports a redesigned form factor that’s almost 25 percent thinner than the iPhone 3GS, a higher resolution multi-touch display, a 5 megapixel camera capable of capturing 720p HD video, an LED flash, a front-facing camera for video calls, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a built-in gyroscope and digital compass, Apple’s A4 processor, and more.
Apple’s headaches with its pre-order program, however, didn’t completely go away when the company brought its Web store back online. Reports of slow loading pages and server errors flooded social networking services like Twitter almost immediately, presumably because of the volume of pre-order requests.
Apple is also currently offering only the black iPhone 4 for pre-order and reservation for in-store pickup. The white model is listed as unavailable.
The 16GB iPhone 4 is priced at US$199, and the 32GB model costs $299.