Telecoms

More rumours of O2 iPhone deal

Forbes Madrid are reporting this morning that O2’s parent company, Telefonica have signed an exclusive deal with Apple for iPhone distribution rights in the UK.

This is the second time this rumour has emerged in the last two weeks. Both times from very credible sources.

It makes sense. Vodafone don’t need Apple (and the sales boost iPhone exclusivity would give them) as much as O2 does. This deal obviously doesn’t stop Apple signing deals with Vodafone in other European countries.

I’ll be interested to see who gets distributorship in Ireland!

6 thoughts on “More rumours of O2 iPhone deal”

  1. One thing that’s annoying me still about this rumour, is that restricting the iPhone to one service provider rules out competition. I mean you have to consider the success of the iPod into this and how one provider having this could give it a very unfair advantage.

    If so I can’t see the EU being happy about that, although granted it will take them at least a Year to realise it but still.

    By the way I think O2 will get as well.

  2. His ‘Steveness’ was seen hovering around their Regent Street store in London last Sunday and speculation is he was there to pen the deal with whatever carrier they are going with and ‘apparently seen’ in the O2 Store in Greenwich the weekend before, and rumour has it he was quite impressed with the place. A bar called the Concierge on Regent St. is closed on Monday 16th – and again speculation is that he will announce the deal and iPhone details to staff then.

    25% of iPhone on AT&T purchasers in the States have switched from another carrier – has to be appealing to any potential European carrier, regardless of Apple’s notoriously tight margins and demanding policies. Think about it, approximately a million iPhones sold to date, 250K of those are new customers and each is tied in to at least a $59.99 per month contract for 2 years = $359Million just in NEW contract payments. No additional minutes, iPhone accessories, Roaming charges etc etc.

  3. Hmm, in Ireland 02 would be the logical choice considering that o2 stores are the main authorised apple re-seller in ROI. However, i’m sure the more lucrative UK and European countries will dictate moreso who Irish customers have to go with to use iPhone.
    It will be interesting to see if iPhone’s firmware is tweaked by the time it reaches Ireland/UK. Initial reports from US users say that lack of landscape keyboard in texting mode and lack of copy/paste functions in the version of OSX it uses are problematic. These are easily fixable with software updates, however the lack of 3G support isn’t. It will be interesting to see if 3G is available on the European version of the iPhone. I’m sure we will have to wait for iPhone 2.0 until the 8gb internal memory is upgraded to something more useful like 20gb.

  4. Found a few more rumours earlier about the European release on appleinsider.com:

    German store claims iPhone sales rights

    Despite no announcements from Apple, the German national retail chain Karstadt has directly claimed that it will sell the iPhone in time for the holidays, according to an impending article in the weekly paper WirtschaftsWoche.

    “We will offer the iPhone,” a Karstadt spokeswoman said in the report while estimating a release before Christmas. European Apple representatives chose not to comment on the claim.

    Third-party Apple reseller Gravis has also said it was virtually certain to stock iPhones in the absence of any official stores.

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