European retailers were sold out of the new iPhone 3G before stores in the US even opened on Friday, thanks in part to strong marketing from Apple’s mobile partners. The initial sales surge not only blew through stores’ inventory but also delivered a knock-out punch to Apple’s iTunes activation servers.
The Swiss daily newspaper “20 Minuten” reported that hundreds waited in line for hours in Zürich in front of the central Swisscom store. The mobile phone provider opened 100 of its retail stores at 6:30 AM and served snacks and water to those waiting in line.

Continues: Europe Sells Out at iPhone 3G Launch

Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple shut down its .Mac services for maintenance Wednesday night while switching over to the new MobileMe. While .Mac email continued to work with some interruptions, other services went down completely, including sync, iDisk file access, webmail, and web hosting. Attempts to access online .Mac services either presented a “this service is temporarily unavailable”page (listed with a copyright date of 2007) or redirected users to the MobileMe preview site.

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