Vodafone's horror week was capped by an inadvertently hilarious interview on NewstalkZB's Paul Holmes' Breakfast this morning.

Holmes gained an exclusive radio interview with Jonny Gladwell, the Auckland student who queued for three nights to become the first person in the world to buy a 3G iPhone.

Appropriately, Holmes placed a call from the studio to the iPhone owner, so he could speak to the broadcaster using his new wonder gadget.

But reception was poor, and as Holmes asked Gladwell to move around the house to find a better signal, it started cutting out altogether. After a couple of minutes, Holmes quickly wrapped it up, to much cracking-up around the studio on the nation's highest-rating radio show. "So much for the iPhone," finished Holmes, as his offsider laughed too hard to add anything.

You can download an audio-clip of the interview here (you have to download the whole audio file for the hour. It's no a very intuitive system; right click the file 07.00 trn-newstalk-zb-akl.asf - and choose Save Target As. The iPhone bit starts 55min 56sec into the file.)

Incidentally, a full-page newspaper ad today reveals Gladwell was in fact a shill for YellowPages.co.nz, with his place in the queue sponsored by the directory service. The ad lists all the items he apparently bought via his mobile while queuing.

"Lucky he ordered all the stuff before he bought his iPhone, with that reception," quipped one of our sales people this morning.

Reception is mostly dependent on the quality of the network connection, of course, but that's probably not an argument any Vodafoners will want to deploy to combat this latest iPhone PR disaster.