Slashdot Mirror
O2 Offered iPhone Contract in UK
davidmcg writes "There has been speculation on who will provide the service for iPhone in the UK. Now, the answer has been provided. It seems that O2 has been offered the contract to provide telephony services in the UK for the iPhone. It seems that the iPhone should be available in the UK in time for Christmas. O2 have refused to confirm or deny these reports, so is it yet another unconfirmed iPhone rumor or is it fact? We can only wait to find out."
Reuters Article
Yep, this thing is getting way too much publicity. Methinks that lots of slashdotters are entranced by the lotus flower...
But what is interesting is that this could be the 'back door' to getting a GSM iPhone in the USA...
I would have to imagine there are two reasons.
Like you said, the visual email thing requires a good deal of vendor support. And I imagine a vendor is only going to put forth the effort required if they see a substantial return on that investment.
Likewise, there's a very good possibility that AT&T has paid Apple for exclusive rights to the launch (a two year term). That contract, which could be worth a lot of money, is probably worth more to Apple than any kind of "good will" that might change the market or the sales they missed because of it.
All that being said, in two years they will likely make it "open" and you'll be able to get your iPhone from any vendor. We'll see though.
-David
I live in Canada and the Apple presence is kind of non-existent. Not counting the iPod, it's pretty hard to find any apple products here in Canada. You can order online, but in terms of physical presence, there is none. There used to be one shop I knew of that sold a lot of Apple stuff (notebooks, monitors, software) but they closed down recently.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Ah, you forget that Apple is interested in extending it's reach. Locking themselves to AT&T is not part of their long term plan - it is the first step of their strategy for jumping into the market with both feet.
Apple cannot survive only with AT&T in the US. They also need to produce devices for Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Just like the other big boys of Nokia, Motorola, and Ericson.
In the US, the service providers run the show. One simply cannot introduce a device to the cell phone market without commitment from a provider. All those cool GSM phones in europe and asia do sell in the US, but without provider backing, the marketplace is weak at best.
So Apple partnered with AT&T - a good choice, since it has the best GSM network in the Americas. Which means that it is relatively easy for Apple to produce a phone for the rest of the GSM world. Also, AT&T was willing to let Apple sell music via iTunes - something that Verizon and Sprint may have not been able to agree to, since they have their own (failed & over-priced) music services.
If and when Apple has a solid market share, it can produce other devices that are unencumbered by service providers. As noted, Apple can make a good profit on the iPhone - but only once the massive engineering, assembly, distribution, marketing, and support costs are spread over millions of devices. Certainly, Apple is still far in the red when it comes to its net profits on the iPhone.
If someone is willing to fork out $500 on a phone, they are much more likely to also want top of the line features (ie 3G). Even Apple can't compete *solely* on their brand name. They actually do have to be competitive on the features they offer, especially in the higher end of the market.
If they use an already approved 3G modem module rather than a discrete chip, they may be able to skip that and go straight to operator approvals.
Jobs has also said that the iPhone isn't programmable (except Web2.0) because a programmable phone would, upon crashing, take down Cingular/AT&T's network.
Jobs isn't above lying occasionally. The power consumption of CDMA (including the W-CDMA needed for UMTS support) chipsets, while higher than the relatively power-efficient GSM, isn't so high that 3G phones aren't being made by every other manufacturer that have perfectly adequate battery lives. Indeed, proportionally, the additional overhead of introducing UMTS to the iPhone, the rest of whose electronics are probably quite hungry compared to an average flip phone, is probably quite small.
I don't know what the true reason for the iPhone's lack of 3G is. But, on the face of it, the power consumption argument is clearly false. This is Steve Jobs buying time. Perhaps it's patent licensing issues that are still in negotiation. Perhaps Apple can't find a chipset reliable enough. Perhaps they want to hold off until UMTS chipsets that support the 1700/2100MHz spectrum (just licensed in the US and not yet rolled out) are widely available.
Power consumption though? Absolute nonsense.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.