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."

Comments

Re:Which is it?

[macmaniac]

Apparently the poster didn't catch that O2 has denied the reports that it has signed a contract with Apple.

Reuters Article

Re:Why do they need exclusive contracts?

[DavidD_CA]

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.

Re:What about smaller countries

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:3G for Europe?

[bogjobber]

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.

Re:European FCC

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:3G chips too power intensive

[squiggleslash]

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.