Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
A report from the Financial Times says that three European cell phone
network companies have been chosen for the iPhone’s initial European
launch, with the announcement set to be confirmed at the IFA consumer
electronics trade fair in Berlin at the end of the month.
The Financial Times has published a story , quoting its German sister publication FT Deutschland, that Apple have signed iPhone distribution deals with three European cell phone network companies including a lucrative financial revenue share deal.
Germany’s T-Mobile, France’s Orange and the UK’s O2 phone networks are the ones said to have won the respective iPhone contracts, with an agreement that Apple will receive 10% of revenue from use of voice and data services, shifting the balance of power to phone manufacturers and signaling an opportunity for Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others to try and get similar revenue sharing deals.
Apple are also said to be refusing the opportunity for the iPhone to be available at a subsidized price. While this means each iPhone will be purchased at full price, phone networks won’t have to extract payments for the phone over a 24-month period, the contract length that’s standard in the US and the contract length expected for the European rollouts.
As expected, none of the cell phone networks nor Apple have confirmed nor denied the story, leaving speculators to wonder whether the IFA trade fair will truly bring any iPhone announcements or not.
The European iPhone is expected to feature the same hardware and electronics as the existing US iPhone, meaning a 2.75G EDGE browsing experience instead of a 3G or 3.5G browsing experience as is common on many higher-end mobile phones today.
Had a new 3G iPhone been ready for a European launch this year, the 3G iPhone would likely have needed to go through FCC or other communications regulatory authority in Europe, in proceedings that can be largely public, although Apple did succeed in stopping the FCC from revealing too many details before the iPhone was released.
Apple has already publicly stated that it wishes to limit the European iPhone launch to the UK, France and Germany in 2007, with Asia, more of Europe and Australia to get the iPhone sometime in 2008.
Although reports that the iPhone has now been hacked to work on almost any phone network through some clever hardware hacking and the semi-cloning of SIM cards with a USB SIM card reader/writer, some Europeans already claim to be using iPhones in Europe.
But these methods are still fiddly and risk being disabled by Apple in future iPhone firmware updates, meaning the best and only truly guaranteed iPhone experience you’ll have is by buying one from Apple and using it with the correct phone network provider.
What a pity the rest of the world has had to wait so much longer before being able to indulge in iPhone goodness.
Still, if the Financial Times report can be believed, the IFA show in late August will bring the iPhone to more of the world’s tech savvy online audiences. We’ll find out in less than a week!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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