iPhone 3G talking Turkey

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 19 August 2008 03:22

Your IT - Mobility

Turkey is set to join the iPhone club with the announcement that wireless carrier Turkcell will start carrying Apple's 3G handset later this year. Hopefully by the time it gets the new iPhone, the reported reception problems with Apple's first phone will be solved.

The iPhone 3G was launched on July 11. Following the initial excitement, there have been widespread reports of reception problems, with suggestions from different quarters that the underlying fault is in the Infineon baseband chip, the firmware, antenna alignment, or the carrier networks.

Turkcell will offer the iPhone 3G to prepaid and postpaid customers. With more than 35 million subscribers, Turkcell is the country's leading wireless carrier.

"We're very excited to be working with Apple to bring the iPhone 3G to Turkey," said Lale Saral Develioglu, Turkcell's chief marketing officer.

"iPhone 3G represents the ultimate in mobile device technologies, and we can't wait to offer this innovative product to millions of mobile customers later this year."

As usual, prices and plans won't be announced until closer to the launch date, whenever that turns out to be. Various carriers already offering the iPhone 3G have been criticised for failing to provide data plans that meet customers' needs. The problem is that AT&T's unlimited data plans are seen by users as the benchmark, but some carriers are offering as little as 100M per month.

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