Now that Apple has summoned the UK press to a London briefing next Tuesday, it looks like the iPhone announcement is imminent. There are no other significant details about the event at its flagship Regent Street outlet, but I know the venue and it is only big enough for a medium-sized launch with about 200 people. This suggests it could just be the UK iPhone announcement alone, not the German or French one.
The speculation to date is that the leading 02 carrier will get the contract. A well-placed mobile industry source told me: “02 will get the contract because the iPhone is worth an extra 500,000 customers to them. That will pull them well out in front of any other carrier. Vodafone had talked to Apple but they couldn’t stomach the revenue share deal so walked away.”
That would chime in with two recent hints. First, that O2’s chief executive, Peter Erskine yesterday told the The Times newspaper that he believes revenue sharing with key handset makers is an inevitability: “If sharing revenue brings a bigger pie to the table, then we’ll be happy to share that pie… The revenue-sharing model will play an increasingly important role in the future of converged communications.” That is a major shift in the thinking of any mobile carrier, which tend to protect their networks and revenues like she-wolves.
The second reason why it is probably 02 which has won the iPhone - and not the other likely candidate Vodafone - is that the latter has just launched its own music service, almost certainly as a spoiler for the iPhone/iTunes service. Subscribers to Vodafone’s MusicStation will have access to more than one million songs from major record labels, which they will be able to download directly to their 3G phones for a flat fee of £1.99 a week. However, this will be a rental service, so when customers stop paying the weekly flat fee, their music becomes unplayable. Not a fantastic spoiler to iTunes then.
Lastly, there remains a couple more questions. Whether this will be the 2.5G US-style version of the iPhone or the full-blown 3G version, and whether the phones will appear in stores before Christmas or be launched in the New Year. The latter looks a lot more likely at this stage.
Meanwhile, in the US iPhone sales have increased three-fold, from roughly 9,000 units sold a day to 27,000 units, after the recent $200 price cut, according to a study by Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster. This is either down to the price cut or to the plethora of free unlocking services which have emerged online, encouraging consumers to try out their existing carrier SIM in the iPhone. Or both.
The Iphone it’s a great thing, but i think that to have success in UK, must wait some months..
Glad I’m with O2, hope they’ll be providing service here in Ireland too!
I wish we knew whether it was 3G or not: I’m holding my iPhone purchase based on it (and having waited to date for the full unlock to use it in Australia)
I love the articles here, BUT:
> that the latter has just launched it’s own music service
…you constantly spell “its” wrong.
It’s only has an apostrophe when it is short for “it is.” The way you’ve written it here, it reads:
“the latter has just launched IT IS own music service”
which, of course, doesn’t make any sense.
t
It’s O2 not 02.
Thanks for the information! But I am not sure about buying the iPhone. Maybe when it’s as cheap like in the US now. A few month before I was sure about the buy - but I heard too much different views, so I need to see, feel and test it by myself to decide.
Apple is taking over the world. Really though I think other companies could learn a lot from Apple’s marketing campaigns.
Saying that a material percentage of the iPhone sales uptick is due to the proliferation of unlocking services, in my view, oversells their impact. The average Joe who can now afford to buy an iPhone isn’t going to go down the hacking route.
Post-price-cut iPhones are now in the sweet spot of where the majority of mainstream smartphone buyers live. As long as it works, I suspect many of them will button their nose and sign on the dotted line with AT&T for as long as they have U.S. exclusivity.
And 2.5G on anything is dead in Europe. They’re so far ahead of North American mobile sensibilities that any carrier that introduces new infrastructure based on anything less than 3G would be committing wireless market suicide.
Such fun, this iPhone mania is turning out to be.
Older WiFi technologies such as 802.11a/b are inferior to the new 802.11n (& MIMO) standards that are designed to boost signal strength without increasing power consumption. Most modern CMOS chips with basic WLAN features draw about 10 microamps of current in sleep mode and 0.6 milliamps while in power save mode while maintaining association to an access point. These chips are usually 50 or 60 square milliameters packaged in a compact low profile ball grid array (LFBGA) for easy integration into handheld devices. They can be integrated with Bluetooth radios as well and engineers have got the radio signals to play nicely together. The challenge with the iPod Touch will be the loss in the excellent battery life the device has when WiFi is used. With WiFi turned off, you can get nearly 7 hours of video battery life. If you are streaming video, Skyping or downloading, while playing music, you’ve got lots of heat and processing power drawing more current, A/D conversions and grabbing packets out of the air. I’d expect to see a 30% or 40% reduction in rated battery life under these conditions. We’ve not even considered any overhead associated with security such as WPA2 or advanced authentication to access fee-based networks. [http://lopezunwired.com]
“And 2.5G on anything is dead in Europe. They’re so far ahead of North American mobile sensibilities that any carrier that introduces new infrastructure based on anything less than 3G would be committing wireless market suicide.”
Not exactly, when 88% of the phones sold in the UK and France are 2G phones, let alone the ‘2.5g’ offered by EDGE.
So will the Euro phones allow SIM card swapping? Wouldn’t they then start showing up here like other unlocked phones?