Apple iPhone was finally made available in Malaysia officially by Maxis. Truly, there are many people who are pretty happy when they heard about this official launch. Of course, there are also some people who are grieving about some stuffs that they feel unsatisfactory. Especially what Maxis have offered to them. Being an iPhone application developer, I was there under Maxis Developer Programme. In fact, all of us in the office went there as MDP provided us a booth for us to promote our products and applications. More importantly, we eventually met with other developers invited by Maxis where we could acquire more information about what and how are they actually developing. It’s nothing much but at least we could learn something from there.

Crowds at the Apple iPhone launch day

We were invited to Menara Maxis (Maxis Tower) at KLCC several days before the launching event. The General Managers of the event asked us to do some video shooting regarding our products. I am unsure who is who as the managers there kinda have multiple tasks and everything. At least I know their names like Colin and Kugan. The video shooting was done simple and fast. Nothing fancy about. However that was my first time inside the office area at Menara Maxis. Something to brag about despite others might have been there for several times already…

Eheh

Visitor tag

The corridor at Level 8

Some PC booths there were not available. This PC has it's anti-virus running which made it unusable during the scanning while there's a PC having BSOD

Randomly taken from inside the building

I can feel the rushing and somewhat mismanagement here and there among the event organizers. Tentatively, the launching on Friday will be on 6 PM until 1 AM and there will be two areas needed to be covered. The official launching at KL Convention Center was mainly for those who pre-ordered the iPhone from Maxis through online and other submissions where Datuk Joseph Salang will be. While in Cyberjaya, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi will be there for somewhat live broadcast and video conference between Cyberjaya and KL Convention Center. Some of us will be in Cyberjaya and the rest in KL Convention Center including me. As the event officially launched, people started getting in and then the VIPs are having those conference thing as the place geting crowded. After some few hours inside the hall, it was not a really pleasant thing. From my own view, Maxis did a lot of damage over there. It’s not because the event totally failed but a lot of things missing such as unstable crowd control. Lemme re-check:

1. We, developers, were under Maxis Developer Programme. I can understand that we’re all required to wear black T-shirts and pants just to mimic how Steve Jobs has always wearing. But what makes me ponder was why do we get the same lanyards as those normal event crews? The manager who was in-charge of providing us the T-shirts and lanyards saying that there weren’t enough stuffs while some other people I saw were getting the special VIP tag.
2. Like what I said in the first point just now, visitors there have always thought that we developers at the developers booth as same as those normal event crews in which their purpose was to guide the visitors on how to do this and that on an iPhone. I’ve been approached by several people asking me about iPhone features and stuffs rather than what we were actually displaying.
3. Some visitors were informed by some unknown crews that the developers’ booths are for getting applications downloaded into their iPhones for free. That was a lie. I can tell that some crews were not getting enough understanding what we were doing there. There’s this Middle Eastern boy (maybe Spanish? I don’t know) asked me whether he can download stuffs for his iPhone. Again, I have to explain to this boy about what are we doing here which is about our products. Just like other people I’ve had to explain.
4. The booth was unsatisfactory. I can understand if Maxis doesn’t want us to put our own banners as they wanted to make it look exclusive for Maxis and iPhone. I don’t mind with that. But the booth was simply… not good enough, I think. A chair for us developers with two other chairs for visitors. Basically, each developer group has one chair on inner side of the each booth. The desk we were getting was so-so. But the most important thing was a big banner or something that shows our booths as developers section or something like that. Since the booths were quite near the entrance, people always thought that we were somewhat information kiosk.
5. When the crowds getting in, it would take sometime for those pre-orders to get their devices. There’s waiting list and all. Eventually there were many people sitting around the middle of the hall where there were some chairs there. But there were not enough. Instead, some of the people came to our booth and used the chairs. We were hoping people came to our booth asking about our development. Not some sort of by-passers using the chairs for them. Again, because there’s no obvious sign of what we were, they people don’t really know or care.
6. There’s food booth outside the hall. Sadly it was only for the visitors. Weren’t we the developers there? Because of the lanyards we were using, we didn’t have the privilege of getting the food. Though sometimes they were slacking but that’s blatantly negative rules. I believed it was due to our event crew lanyards. Being over there from around 4 PM to 11 PM, I was quite hungry as I was only have my food during the lunch. No free food for such event is bad, you know?
7. Since there’s a food booth, people will be taking some plates for the foods. When they finished eating, eventually some people put the empty plates at our booth. Superb. Now our booth became an empty plate collecting section. Sigh.

Perhaps there were other things I missed out but above are some points I listed from what I experienced in just one day. I didn’t attend the Saturday and Sunday parts because I have assignments needed to be done and submitted on Sunday for my Masters study. I saw Misbun Sidek and Lee Chong Wei on that night passing by our booth though. Perhaps they were getting the iPhone as well and they seemed rushing.

*facepalm*