Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大) yesterday said it has received about 10,000 orders for Apple Inc’s new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus within three hours of its presale offer starting.
The company said it was surprised to find the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, with 64 gigabytes of memory, was proving more popular than the iPhone 6, which has a smaller 4.7-inch screen.
“We found that pre-orders for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, or requests about the new phones, are much higher than previous iPhone versions,” Taiwan Mobile spokesman Iris Liu (劉麗惠) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
The nation’s second-largest telecommunications operator was the first in the country to accept pre-sale orders for the new Apple products.
Taiwan Star Telecom Corp (台灣之星), a new entrant to the nation’s 4G market, began taking online pre-orders later in the afternoon.
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) has said that it would start accepting pre-orders on Tuesday.
Chunghwa said that it has sold more than 1 million iPhones since the first-generation iPhone hit the Taiwanese market in 2008.
The nation’s largest telecom operator said the new iPhones would likely become a hot trend locally because they are the first iPhones with screens bigger than 4 inches.
Far EasTone Telecommunications Co (遠傳電信) said consumers should register with the company to receive the latest information about the pre-ordering and tariff rates for the two new phones.
The company received more than 10,000 subscriptions for its notification service in two hours, Far EasTone spokesperson Lang Ya-ling (郎亞玲) said by telephone yesterday.
Both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will be available in stores nationwide on Sept. 26.
According to Apple Taiwan’s Web site, prices for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 start from NT$22,500 (US$750) for a 16GB model.
The starting price for the same capacity 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus will be NT$25,900, the Web site showed.
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