The long awaited launch day for the iPhone 4 has arrived, and it is way bigger than previous iPhone launches. We were up at 5am to get up to get to the Apple UK flagship store in Regent St, London. Arriving at 7am we joined the end of a long, long queue of about 3000 fellow Appleites waiting to get their hands on the new iPhone 4.

Just before 8:00 a huge cheer went up round the corner at the front of the store…

We were still around the corner so had no idea what was happening, but shortly after 8 we started moving. There were 2 queues one for reserved devices and one for “pot-luck”. Fortunately we had reserved our devices and our queue was moving a lot faster.

Just after 9:30 we had moved onto Regent St and could see the Apple flag flying above the doors, and yet another queue to get in the store. 9:45 saw us in the door leaving the heat of the street behind, for the air conditioned interior.

Apple are selling both PAYG and contract iPhones as well as upgrades for existing users. Bearing in mind the length of the queues and the fact that they had not turned any of the pot-luck people away the chances are that they have plenty of stock.

This is not the case in other outlets as we are hearing of a lot of disappointed buyers at O2 and other outlets where stock has been as low as 25 iPhones. This was a scenario we were expecting and is why we pre-ordered ours.

We are now snaking around the glass staircase waiting our turn. Looks like we will not get them before midday. Apparently the reason for this is that the POS hand terminals keep crashing. About time they moved from Windows Mobile to iPod Touch devices like the US.