Vodafone To Be Official UK iPhone Carrier
It appears that a new 3G version of the iPhone will be launched Monday in the UK by Apple – in a join promotion with Vodafone, T-Mobile of Germany, and Carphone Warehouse. The 3G data transfer speeds are a great bonus for us Europeans the ones who had to wait while the whole of the US got excited!
Hints of the European launch emerged yesterday when Bill Condie of the London Evening Standard tipped Vodafone to be the official carrier, which will be confirmed Monday.Shipment date is still unknown, but “on course” for the year-end date predicted last October by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.Vodafone is currently in an ideal position to take on the iPhone, because its 3G network is hugely under-utilised. Pricing on mobile data is normally prohibitive, but Vodafone has recently revised its 3G data charges down, following “rip-off” complaints from users. I actually had a massive £850 (approx $1400) charge from Orange for 950mb of data. They mislead me on their call plan “Free evening and weekend Orange World” which i assumed was their “Orange WAP”. But no Orange World is their tiny intranet style page for Orange customers. So I have no problems with switching to Vodafone especially with their YouTube deal that will go nicely with the iPhone YouTube player.
It may even be possible that European data prices will match, or be an improvement on the eye-watering charges announced by AT&T in North America.
The iPhone requires a high speed Internet connection to function properly, both because of its excellent Internet browsing capacity, and also because of its requirement for high quality video, which limits the appeal of the US version.
I think it’s great that outisde the US we can get excited and have a unique selling point over America. This isn’t a dig but we are always left behind with big product launches like games consoles etc.
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Any idea if Vodafone is going to be iphone carrier in other european countries ?
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