The launch of new Apple’s iPhone has turned into an information-technology meltdown, as customers were unable to get their phone working. Kenny Pichardo was the first to buy an iPhone 3G at AT&T store in the New York borough of Queens. However, he said it took the store half an hour to get the phone working. That boded badly for the approximately 70 people after him in line. Pichardo had camped out overnight to be first.

Frederick Smalls, an insurance broker in Whitman, Mass., said that it was such grief and aggravation. He has spent two hours on the phone with Apple and AT&T, trying to get his new iPhone to work.

In stores, people waited at counters to get the phones activated, as lines built behind them. Many of those fanatics had already camped out for several hours in line to become among the first with the new phone that updates the one launched a year ago by adding a navigation chip and speeding up Internet access.

A spokesperson for AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US, said that there was a global problem with Apple’s iTunes software that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned.

Instead, employees are telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own PCs. However, the iTunes servers were equally hard to reach from home, leaving the phones unusable except for emergency calls. The problem extended to owners of the previous iPhone model. A software update released for that phone on Friday morning required the phone to be reactivated through iTunes.

When the first iPhone went on sale a year ago, customers performed the whole activation procedure at their own home, off-loading employees. However, the new model is subsidized by carriers (the price has also been cut substantially to $199 for the cheapest model in the United States), as is standard in the wireless industry, and AT&T and Apple therefore planned to activate all phone in-store.

The Apple’s iPhone has been widely known for its rich features and ease of use. However, Apple is a newcomer to the cell-phone business, and it has made some missteps. When it launched the first phone in the US a year ago, it initially priced the phones high, at $499 and $599. Later on, Apple cut the price by $200 just 10 weeks later, throwing early buyers for a loop.

The new iPhone went on sale Friday in 22 countries. In most of them, it was the first time any iPhone was officially sold there, though several countries have seen a brisk grey-market trade in phones imported from the US. On the Japanese market, the iPhone’s capabilities are less revolutionary, where people already have for years-used tech-heavy local phones for restaurant searches, music downloads, e-mail, electronic shopping and reading digital novels.

The latest Japanese cell phones have two key features absent on the iPhone: digital TV broadcast reception and the “electronic wallet” for making payments at stores and vending machines equipped with special electronic readers. However, they do not have the iPhone’s glamour image and nifty touch screen. By Friday morning, the line at the Softbank Corp. store in Tokyo had grown to more than 1,000 people, and the phone quickly sold out.