The second wave of the iPhone 4S launch is underway. After launching in the US, the UK and several other countries on October 14, Apple's latest smartphone went on sale on Friday in 22 more countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
MacRumors reports that Apple's online store in those locations are already seeing long ship times, one to two weeks for the iPhone 4S. In fact one country, Singapore, doesn't have any iPhones available for sale at its online store. This shows that demand for the device has been high no matter where you might live in the world.
Even though the iPhone 4S isn't as big of a hardware upgrade compared to the iPhone 4, the delay in the release of the smartphone has apparently generated more demand for the iPhone 4S than anticipated. While there are still a number of smartphones that are waiting in the wings to be launched this year (the Motorola Droid RAZR, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.0 and Nokia's Lumia phones), it's not likely that any of them will have close to the launch sales numbers of the iPhone 4S.
At the same time, we suspect that Apple won't make customers wait 16 more months for the next version of the iPhone. But if it is just another small hardware update rather than a major revision, there are going to be questions raised about the future of the device.
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