30,000 consumers in France say ‘oui’ to iPhone

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 05 December 2007 22:09

Mobility

The iPhone only launched in France on November 29, but already French telco Orange has reported selling 30,000 iPhones, showing the iPhone phenomenon shows no signs of slowing down, even in the face of a 3G model arriving sometime in 2008.

French telco Orange has sold 30,000 iPhones in less than a week, with reports suggesting that French enthusiasm for the iPhone is much higher than in the UK, even down to long queues forming in France on launch day to be the first to buy an iPhone, in stark contrast to reports of a much cooler launch day reception by UK consumers.

That said, Orange’s stated goal is to sell 100,000 iPhones by the end of the year, so thousands more iPhones need to sell each day in France before Dec 31 for Orange to hit their target of at least 70,000 more sales.

Of the 30,000 sold so far, only 1500 of those were sold without a contract, most if not all of which we can safely assume were unlocked with the iPhone Dev Team’s free ‘AnySIM’ unlocking tool for use on any standard GSM network

On the flip side, Orange says that 80% of the customers did indeed purchase the recommended ‘Orange for iPhone’ service which, like iPhone plans in the US, UK and Germany, offers ‘unlimited’ data for web browsing, other data-hungry apps such as Google Maps and access to the incredibly handy Visual voicemail service.

Orange has three price points to buy an iPhone, all of which require the addition of a voice and data plan, starting at €399 for an iPhone with the ‘Orange for iPhone’ service, €549 for an iPhone with one of Orange’s other contracts or for €649 if you want to buy it outright and no Orange phone plan is going to be chosen.

While €649 is quite expensive, it’s a third cheaper than the €999 T-Mobile was planning on charging customers wanting a iPhone not tied to only one company, and which T-Mobile has since stopped offering due to a German court siding with T-Mobile over the locking of phones and overturning Vodafone’s bid to get their own slice of iPhone action.

French iPhone owners can actually unlock their phones at any time, whether free of charge after 6 months, or by paying a €100 unlocking fee to Orange to have it done much sooner, if desired.

But now, the real test comes... and is continued on Page 2.