Yes I finally managed to get ahold of the iPhone 6+ from Apple and getting to where I am now took a lot of time as well as effort.
First and foremost, I am the type of person who wouldn’t want to pay a premium for a phone just to be one of the early adopters. Like many others, I waited for one to be offered by Maxis. And like many who were excited, when Maxis announced that pre-orders would start at the end of October, we were all waiting with great eagerness.
As the announcements started coming out on social media, I went through the steps highlighted by Maxis (via their online site) and I received an email confirming that I was eligible to pre-order the phone.
The email gave me a sense of confidence that my account had no issues and I knew I had only a month left on my existing contract. 31st October approached and I sat in front of my computer eagerly refreshing the online store. Just 30 minutes before midnight, the store crashed and everyone had issues connecting to the store. It was so bad that I couldn’t even log in. This continued for the entire day on the 31st of October.
Not only that many people couldn’t pre-order, after 2 days of attempting to get into the website, when I finally managed to log in, the online system didn’t allow me to use my existing number when I tried to check out. It kept prompting me to register a new number or asked me to transfer from another telco.
After logging 4 calls to the Helpdesk, their only response that the sales team would call me and that they can sort it out. The first thing they mentioned was that I had a month left in my contract hence I had that issue but after checking with the online forums, people with 2-3 months had no issues ordering the phone.
The apparent “tai chi-ing” culture that we have as a problem to the sales team. At first I thought it wouldn’t be a problem because I received an sms like the one below.
The next day, the sales team called me and told me that I have no more pre-order because my account was tagged to a corporate line. And I thought being a corporate customer would get a better priority but I guess it isn’t the case. That night after work I headed to the nearest Maxis store. After a quick Google search, from where I was based in Cyberjaya, the nearest and most convenient one for me was at Sunway Pyramid. I arrived there and after 45 minutes of waiting in queue, my line was tagged as a personal line within 5 minutes.
I am baffled that if the folks at the center only needed to take 5 minutes to untag me, I wondered why the sales team couldn’t have done it for me.
After settling my account, I went home and tried the online store. By this time it was already the 3rd of November and the store was back in operation. I checked out and finally I could select the option where I can use my existing number.
Instead of ordering, I decided to try my luck by queuing up at Maxis KLCC on the 6th of November. At 5.30am I was 4th in line and by 7.30am the stores, opened.
Sadly even the guy who was first in line (I swear that idiot cut our queue but the folks in front of me just let him cut in), the staff announced that all units of the iPhone 6+ 64Gb and 128Gb were completely out of stock.
I settled for a 16Gb iPhone 6+ Space Grey. It seemed like the popular colour choice as I knew that others might want it and I was honestly hoping to trade it up for a larger capacity one.
After getting the phone on Thursday, I managed to trade my phone to a 64Gb Silver iPhone 6+ with a nice chap on Monday and now I am happily using it.
First impressions with the iPhone 6+? It is huge. I started writing this article on my iPhone and sadly the entire article wasn’t uploaded here!
The phone is huge and using it with one hand takes some getting used to. I love the size of the screen and I got a cheap case to protect the phone after my trade.
I am only waiting now for most of the apps to be updated to utilize the full HD screen available on the iPhone 6+ as everything seems a little too large and pixelated for my liking.
