I'm not fan of Apple, but I have had a little look at a few and they are pretty cool. I admit some envy, when comparing them to my clunky (soon to be replace Blackberry). The other week even the builder was showing me some work he had done on his iPhone. He thumb surfed with ease. I didn't ask him if he was on O2, although I should have done. The problem is not so big in the UK as in the US where a report yesterday said that more than a quarter of iPhones sold in the US (or one million plus) have been "unlocked" to work on network providers other than Apple's "exclusive" partner AT&T. People have done it in the UK as well and for good reason. If you really want the phone, it is quite wrong to be forced to change network. Consumers have sent Apple a message, but Steve Jobs has never struck me as the kind of guy who listens. Apple is more about basking in the glory of its achievments (which - to be fair - are many in recent years) than engaging in customer dialogue.
Apple, of course, pursued its one mobile phone operator per country for a good reason. Healthy profits. It gets a slice of the airtime charges unlike other mobile phone manufacturers who do not. It must have sounded like a genius idea at the time of conception. I thinking it sounds less genius like now. A study done by Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi says that if Apple sells 10m iPhones in the US by the end of 2008, 30% of them will have been unlocked, which will cost $500m (£251m) in revenues. That news came as O2 overhauls the cost of using Apple's iPhone after just two months from the time it went on sale. The mobile network will improve the package of its not insignificant lower rate £35 and £45 per month tariff, giving these customers substantially better deals and at the same time introducing a new "super-tier" contract costing £75 per month. Sign me up. No wait. This comes after last week's news that sales of Apple's iPhone in the UK have fallen short of expectations. O2 sold a reported 10,000 fewer handsets than expected ,with around 190,000 iPhone handsets shifted in the UK in the two months beginning November 9. The low figure comes despite a massive on- and offline press campaign and much press coverage aimed at enticing consumers to sign up to the product's 18-month contract, at a cost of £899, which is simply incomparable with anything else on offer in the market. It is thought that sales could also have been hit by recent reports that Apple could soon be offering a new iPhone with twice the memory, but for the same price as the original phone. The iPhone currently has just 8Gb of memory, meaning it can store up to 2,000 songs. However, reports last week said that Apple could soon be releasing phones with 16Gb or even 32Gb of memory. There are, as you can see, one or two kinks in the marketing and sales strategy of the iPhone that has put a lot of people off. There could soon be more to contend with as reports continue to circulate that Google and Dell are plotting their own launch. Plans could be out as early as next month's 3GSM conference in Barcelona. It could give us the much speculated about GPhone. Sounds as cool as an iPhone without all the restrictive baggage that comes with Apple products. You only have to look at its new slimline Mac Air Book -- as someone on our forums pointed out: " You might get a USB 2.0 socket, a micro-DVI socket, a headphones jack and iSight webcam, but there is no optical drive, no FireWire port, no VGA, no DVI, no Ethernet socket, no chance of expanding the RAM memory or the hard drive and strangest of all no replaceable battery". Google late last year announced its mobile operating systems Android and there was no paranoia. It was open systems. I'm definitely happy to wait.
Gordon Macmillan
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