No 1 fan buys his place to be front of the queue for iPhone

Apple fans queued through the night to be the first to buy the new iPhone 3G.

The phone went on sale for the first time today and the first man in Britain to obtain it was a 27-yearold student who bid on eBay for the first place in the queue outside the Apple store in Regent Street.

While other buyers had spent the night on the pavement with free blankets provided by the store to keep them warm, David Suen, from Canary Wharf, simply turned up at dawn after paying £41 for the prime spot.

Mr Suen said: "It is everything I need and it's Apple so what more is there to say.

"I would have camped out otherwise because I had to be first in line."

Antonio Guerra, 19, of St John's Wood, a fashion student at the London College of Fashion, was second in the queue.

He said: "I got here yesterday afternoon and camped out all night and I'm still not at the front of the queue.

"Everything I own is Apple. For people like me there is no option but to queue up like this because we can't stand not to get our hands on the new products as soon as possible."

The man who auctioned his place at the front of the queue was advertising wearable sleeping bags.

Sunil Raman, 29, of Rotherhithe insisted that 10 per cent of the money he made would be going to Oxfam before he joined the back of the queue to buy a phone himself.

Other Apple stores around the world opened at midnight but the London branch is banned from the late-night openings after previous gadget releases were marred by violence.

The first people in the world to buy the phone were in New Zealand, where hundreds queued at Vodafone stores. Softbank Corp, which sells the iPhone in Japan, said more than 1,500 people lined up outside its flagship store in Tokyo just before its launch.

Analysts expect the new iPhone to draw as many as 10.5 million buyers worldwide this year.

There are already sixmillion of the older devices in use but the 3G has faster web links, supports third-party software, such as games and instant messaging, and is heavily subsidised by phone carriers, some of which are giving it away to lure new users.