Thousands of Apple fans lined up early Friday outside the popular gadget maker's flagship stores around the world to be among the first to grab the new iPhone 4S.

The iPhone 4S is available to be pre-order online, but many preferred waiting in lines for days outside Apple’s brick & mortar stores as a sign of honor for legendry Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who pass away just a day after the launch of the latest version of the iPhone.

Apple store in Covent Garden, London, also witnessed long queues of potential buyers of iPhone 4S. In Australia, 15-year-old Tom Mosca was the first to enter the doors of Apple’s flagship Sydney store to get his hands on an iPhone 4S.

Mosca said he had been waiting outside the store for around three days. Speaking on the topic, he said, “I did it for Steve Jobs as a tribute. I was very sad at his passing.”

The iPhone 4S, which recorded more than one million pre-orders on the very first day of its availability, comes equipped with a retina display with a resolution of 960 by 460 pixels, a 1GHz dual-core A5 SoC processor, 512MB of DDR2 memory, and an 8MP rear-facing camera.

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, has estimated that Apple could sell as many as 25 million units of the iPhone 4S in the last three months of 2011.