The iPhone 4 landed in Hong Kong and other Asia-Pac markets at midnight last night with varying degrees of flair, but the burning question is: does anyone care about Antennagate?
If they do, you wouldn’t know it from the events across the city and the queues at shop outlets prior to the midnight launch.
CSL pulled out the most stops for its iPhone 4 kickoff. Its launch party at The Peak for its corporate 1010 brand was top-loaded with celebrity power (including Alex Fong, Ana R., Janis Chan, Douglas Yeung, William Tang and Sharon Cheung) and a cheesy intro sketch set to the Mission: Impossible theme.
The market leader 3 HK also roped in some star power and sex appeal for its launch in North Point, including singer Kelvin Kwan, local rock band Mister, rap duo FAMA and Chrissie Chau.
SmarTone-Vodafone, by contrast, kept it comparatively simple, forsaking celebrity gimmicks in favor of renting out space at the International Finance Centre in Central for a massive sales team to take orders. CEO Douglas Li officiating a ribbon-cutting ceremony was as sexy as it got – apart from the iPhones themselves.
The elephant in the room – the antenna issue – didn’t come up at any of the launch events. Not officially, anyway. So we did our own test.
A case-free iPhone 4 from CSL yielded a five-bar signal during a phone call from Telecom Asia group editor Joseph Waring to your reporter. So either Mr Waring was holding it right or the signal problems experienced by US customers might have been blown out of proportion. (Other tech journos in Singapore and Hong Kong did a similar test yesterday with no signal problems.)