Photo: Apple

caption: The success of the iPhone 4S could be down to respect for Apple’s founder.

In a fitting testimony to the life of Steve Jobs, his customers rallied around the iPhone 4S, launched the day before he died, ordering a record 1 million handsets by the time it went on sale on Friday, breaking the record set by last year’s model, which sold 600,000 in pre-orders.

Apple and phone companies in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, France and Germany had started taking orders a week earlier.

A spokeswoman for Lime, which sells the iPhone 4, said the 4S is not yet officially available in Jamaica, though she expected someone would have brought one in from the US already.

The iPhone 4S costs US$200 with a two-year contract, in return for a faster processor and an improved camera.

But marketing experts said the success of the 4S could be down to public feeling about the death of the company’s leader. Just as sales of records peak after a performer dies, products designed by widely admired figures usually see an upsurge in sales after their death.

British newspapers reported at the weekend that Apple’s visionary founder, who died aged 56 on October 5, had laid plans to carry his technology company through to 2015.

A copy of his death certificate made public Monday indicates that he died of respiratory arrest resulting from pancreatic cancer that had spread to other organs.

Apple did not disclose his cause of death, but Jobs had been in poor health for a number of years.

He battled pancreatic cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January – his third since his health problems began – and resigned in August, handing the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.

The death certificate, released by the Santa Clara County Public Health Department and obtained by The Associated Press, said Jobs had a metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor for the past five years. It listed his immediate cause of death as respiratory arrest.

He died at his home in Palo Alto. No autopsy was performed, and he was buried on Friday. Details of the certificate were reported earlier by Bloomberg News.

The certificate listed Jobs’s occupation as a high-tech entrepreneur. Jobs started Apple in his parents’ Silicon Valley garage with friend Steve Wozniak in 1976. Both men left Apple in 1985 – Jobs following a clash with then-CEO John Sculley.

Jobs returned in 1997 as interim CEO after Apple, then in dire financial straits, bought Next, a computer company he started. That was the start of Apple’s remarkable turnaround, which continues today with the popularity of products such as the iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Following Jobs’ death, Cook emailed a statement to Apple employees saying Jobs “leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”

An Apple spokesman declined to comment beyond statements it released last week after Jobs’ death.

AP