I so nearly joined in. Thought about it for days, contacted the retailer online and responded to their emarketing like a good consumer, did not moan when their IT collapsed, drove to the store to make sure I knew when I had to be there to give them my money, set my alarm so that I would be up in time to be at the store at least an hour before they told me to report… and then at the 11th hour I changed my mind. Yes folks, I am talking about my close brush with ‘iPhone stupidity’!

If you ever needed tangible evidence of a consumer brand that is pure Heroin (or crack if you are under 25), just look at Apple. My relationship with them is simple: they make it / I buy it. Even if I don’t really need it I will still want that feeling of buying a gorgeous product in beautiful packaging shrouded with excellent service.

So what went wrong with iPhone 3G? Something even more powerful than crack cocaine… o2!!! They managed to completely kill all the power of the Apple brand for me through a whole series of inept mistakes. To the extent that in the final analysis they managed to stop me buying the new phone. Didn’t need a new phone, my current iPhone is only a few months old, don’t need more functionality, don’t even need 3G…. but I needed my Apple fix!

So thank you o2 for forcing me into cold turkey, showing me that I can break my addiction to Apple, reminding me just how strong an effect you can have when you combine poor execution of a product launch, rude shop assistants and a website that crashes due to unexpected load (who would have guessed that they would have had a few extra visitors as the only UK air time provider for the hottest phone on the market?)

However some were not as fortunate as me as this video at techcrunch shows

Don’t give up people – if I can beat the habit so can you