This morning, Apple revealed the details about the iPhone’s launch in the UK.
To be available from November 9th 2007, Apple will offer the iPhone in an exclusive contract deal with UK mobile provider O2.
The phone will be priced at £269, the same price as the 16Gb iPod Touch in the UK. It will be supplied with an 18-month O2 contract comprising unlimited data on EDGE and WiFi, and three voice plans at £35, £45 and £55 per month, depending on bundled voice minutes and SMS messages.
The UK iPhone will effectively be the same unit as that available in the US – 8Gb of internal flash storage and EDGE and WiFi data networking. Rumours that the European devices would include 3G have not panned out with this release, although details of other European country launches were not made available.
Differences in the contractual arrangements with O2 as compared to the US AT&T contract include a ‘fair usage’ cap on the unlimited data terms (a standard proviso with UK mobile carriers), and 18-moth contractual obligation instead of the two years that AT&T asks for, and inclusive free WiFi data from 7500 hotspots across the UK, in a partnership between O2 and UK hotspot provider The Cloud.
O2 promise to have 30% of the UK’s population covered by EDGE by the November availability of the iPhone, and it is this which has no doubt lead to the inclusive WiFi bundling. The iPhone will apparently fall back to GPRS data (even slower than EDGE!) in areas where WiFi and EDGE are not available.
O2 also announced that their existing data plan customers will begin to be migrated to unlimited data plans from the beginning of October.
Click the related link for O2’s iPhone information page.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.