Ryoho Yamashita, a 23-year-old student, had queued since midnight at a Softbank store in Tokyo and said there had been a celebratory atmosphere among those waiting.
“It’s like a festival that I enjoy every year,” he said, holding his new purchase as he praised the smartphone’s light weight and faster connection.
In Hong Kong, grey marketeers pounced on anyone who emerged from the city’s official Apple store, offering a premium for their phone in the hope of re-selling it for even more given shortages in the retail market.
“I paid about HK$8,000 ($1,030) for the iPhone just now. We’ll sell it for around HK$9,000 to HK$10,000,” said Suen, a reseller who refused to give his full name. The normal retail price starts at HK$5,588 in the Apple store.
In Singapore, staff at an Apple reseller were turning people away, having run out of phones within hours of opening.
In Tokyo, engineer Masaru Mitsuya, 30, shrugged off some shortcomings with the new iPhone’s built-in iOS 6 operating system that have attracted heavy criticism online.
“On the whole the new product is better,” he said. “But I know the mapping function is not great. A station suddenly appears in the sea or Korean characters appear. But I’ll survive by downloading Google-made software.”
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics said it was considering adding the new iPhone to a patent infringement case as part of a long-running global legal battle between the rival smartphone giants.
Samsung officials said the company would look into amending its side of an ongoing patent lawsuit in a US court to include the latest Apple gadget.
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