With a lot of excitement, finally the iPhone 4S has been launched at midnight on November 25. Despite the absurd hour, a number of dealers have walked in to Airtel’s office at Peninsula Towers, Lower Parel, to collect phones for their customers, joined by a few die-hard customers.

Stockbroker Punit Thakkar, 24, was one of the first people to book the new iPhone worth R 45,500 on the Apple site. And he said, “I’m a very big fan and feel it’s worth the price,” adding, “Nothing beats their features and apps. And now the iPhone 4S features iCloud, where you can save data and access it from anywhere, even if you lose the phone.”

He has mentioned that his favourite feature is the 8-megapixel camera and Siri, the phone’s voice recognition and control feature. Thakkar wouldn’t even unwrap his phone in the store and saying that he wanted to have his mother open it at home. Another fanatic user who has picked up his pre-booked device was Yash Vikram, a bookstore owner in Thane.
He further added, “I have waited to own this phone for weeks now, and now I have finally got my hands on one”. Interestingly, he has also claimed to be the first person in the city to buy the biography of Steve Jobs, Apple’s much-revered CEO who recently lost his battle with cancer.
Across the city, at the Aircel showroom in Khar, 24-year-old mechanical engineer Sushant Deshmukh also dropped a cool R 44,500 to pay his respects to Jobs. “This is my tribute to him. A friend of mine who works at Aircel saw my excitement, so he told me he’d get me the first phone. And at 12 am sharp, I got it in my hand they told me a little about how to use it properly, but I experimented all night” says Deshmukh, who slept only for an hour that night.
Though he is yet to read Jobs’s biography, all he knows of the icon is from YouTube videos and obituaries that were published after his demise. Ask whether he feels his ‘tribute’ is a bit expensive, and he laughs, “It’s expensive for those who don’t own it.
Once you have it, it’s worth your cash.”