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.
It may sound odd to our Australian and European readers, but the Americans are getting excited about the prospect of being able to buy iPhones from stores other than those operated by Apple or AT&T. Best Buy has announced it will start selling the popular handset on September 7.
In Australia, a variety of mobile phone franchises sell the iPhone on behalf of carriers such as Optus. And in the UK, Carphone Warehouse was appointed to sell the iPhone alongside carrier O2's own stores.
But so far, US buyers have been given the choice of Apple Stores or AT&T stores. From next month the iPhone will be available from almost 1000 Best Buy store around the country. This will come close to doubling the number of outlets where the handset can be purchased.
Interestingly, the Best Buy Mobile operation is a 50:50 joint venture with Carphone Warehouse. That operation also involves more than 2400 Carphone Warehouse and Phone House stores in Europe.
The expansion in the number of US outlets suggests Apple is starting to get supply and demand for the iPhone into balance, although a phone store I pass regularly has had a "sorry, no iPhones today" sign on seemingly permanent display since July 11.
But even if that's not the case and supplies are still tight, increasing the number of outlets may spread the load on stores caused by the time-consuming signup process.
Best Buy already sells Macs and iPods at many of its stores.
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 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
