The overall reports on the launch of the iPhone in the UK is that it was a bit of a flop—The Register has a piece claiming that journalists and PR people outnumbered customers, for example. Still, as other people have pointed out, the real fanatics would already have a jailbroken one from the US and the success of the iPhone in the UK will be judged by its total sales, not just its opening night sales. I don’t want to get all sociological, but another reason could be a difference in temperament—more than one story has mentioned the greater attraction of going to the pub on a friday night rather than lining up for an iPhone. ZDNet UK mentioned “Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) employees who had to repeatedly run around the queue slapping people on the backs and whooping loudly”, which sounds like a doomed attempt to get some MacWorld-style fervent excitement going in the wrong place if ever I’ve heard one. As for actual figures, they’re not very forthcoming—Thomson Financial writes that “Peter Erskine, chief executive of Telefonica’s (NYSE: TEF) 02 Europe, said the mobile operator has sold hundreds of thousands of Apple iPhones in the UK since the heavily-hyped multimedia handsets went on sale last Friday evening”, although exact figures aren’t given. He also said that two-thirds of the customers were new to O2. TechDigest quotes the Ars Technica blog which quotes an anonymous source as saying O2 had 8,000 iPhone activations on Friday, more than the company expected…and that the exclusive deal between O2 and Apple is for five years. Have a grain of salt with that…