People queue outside Apple's flagship store in Sydney Overall, however, early sales of Apple's iPhone 5 appeared to live up to the pre-launch hype with stores in London, New York and Sydney and shops in Asia selling out of the latest smartphone within hours of its release. Apple has also sold 2m new iPhones through pre-orders within the first 24 hours of launch. At Apple's flagship London Regent Street store, one customer in the queue had been sponsored by Domino's Pizza, and had received free pizzas over the past few days. In Singapore, the iPhone sold out in less than an hour at one of five approved outlets, forcing the manager to display an "out of stock" sign at the entrance for the rest of the day. I was expecting about the same as the launch of the iPhone 4 but this time round it got an even better response," Eric Wee, manager of the iStudio store near Raffles Place, said. The enthusiasm came despite widespread complaints about the phone's new mapping function, which misnamed towns, lost train stations, including London's Paddington, and showed poor search results from the new Maps app. The iPhone 5 retails at £529 for the 16GB version and up to £699 for the 64GB phone in the UK and A$799 (US$838) in Australia for the smaller memory version and A$999 for the larger model, but is cheaper if purchased with a two-year mobile phone contract. Reporting by Mark Wembridge in London, Neil Hume in Sydney, Jeremy Grant in Singapore and Anjli Raval in New York