iPhone 4 Madness Arrives

Huge crowds mobbed Apple Stores around the country Thursday morning to be among the first to get their hands on the ultra-hyped Apple iPhone4 smartphones, perhaps the most sought after device in recent consumer electronics history.

At the Apple Store at Town Square Mall in Las Vegas, a sales associate told InternetNews.com that dozens of people were queued up well in advance of the store's 7 a.m. opening and they all had only one thing on their minds.

"It's been crazy," said one associate named "Shelly" who didn't want to disclose her full name. "It's really busy right now and has been all morning. I don't really even have time to talk to you about it. It's crazy and it's all about the iPhone 4."

It's still too early to make any definitive predictions, but analysts and Apple officials are confident that the iPhone 4 demand will easily outpace the record early sales of both the original iPhone and the iPhone 3GS.

The original iPhone sold more than 270,000 units during its opening weekend in June 2007. That was followed up by the iPhone 3G launch in July 2008, which sold more than 1 million units in its opening weekend.

If pre-orders are any indication, the iPhone 4 will easily eclipse even those impressive sales figures. Early demand for it was so acute, online shoppers crashed the servers at both Apple and service provider AT&T's online sites as more than 600,000 pre-orders were placed in the first day.

"It was the largest number of preorders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions," Apple said in a statement. "Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration."

Along with the customary hype for anything and everything Apple, the iPhone 4's mystique increased dramatically after an Apple employee accidentally left a prototype behind at a Bay Area bar. The prototype was later sold to gadget site Gizmodo and set in motion a series of bizarre legal and media events that created even more buzz.

The iPhone 4 16GB version costs $199 for new customers and those eligible for an upgrade and the 32GB model goes for $299.

While consumers flock to the stores to buy the new phone from Apple, the wireless industry is bracing for a huge increase in enterprise adoption of the iPhone 4, which, coupled with iOS 4, now includes more mobile management and mobile security tools.

The iPhone 4G seen as a mobile computing device means more competition for Research In Motion's BlackBerry, long the front-runner in the enterprise.

BlackBerrys are still the most popular corporate device, with 70 percent of IT departments currently supporting them, but about 29 percent of businesses now support the iPhone, up from 17 percent last year and none in 2007 when the iPhone first launched, according to Forrester Research stats cited in a Wall Street Journal article chronicling smartphone rivals RIM and Apple.

Larry Barrett is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.