On November 21 Vodafone has filed a lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom, in an attempt to force the mobile operator, T-Mobile to sell to sell the device without a mandatory plan.

"We want it to be available to buyers without a mandatory calling plan…[...].If I had wanted to halt sales, I could have, but I didn't.", Vodafone Deutschland head Friedrich Joussen said at the time in an interview in for Frankfurter Rundschau.

After today decision, Vodafone announced it would decide its next move after company legal counsel had analyzed the judges' written ruling, which has not yet been handed out.

"We reserve the right to appeal," a spokesman said. Previous to the iPhone European launch there were rumors that Vodafone lost the distribution deal after it refused to share the revenues with Apple.

Since the launch of iPhone on June 30, Apple offered its device tied with subscriptions plans with specific providers.

For example, in US AT&T is the only mobile carrier who is able to sell an iPhone, while for Europe Apple has selected as distributors Telefonica’s O2 for UK, T-Mobile for Germany and France Telecom’s Orange for France.

While no one knows for sure how and if the mobile carriers are sharing their iPhone-generated revenues with Apple, there were speculations that the Cupertino-based company gets 10% from all the incomes made from calls and data transfers by customers over iPhones.

Also, as Deutsche Telekom will stop selling unlocked iPhones, Apple found itself in a rather strange situation. In France, where iPhone was launched on November 29, in order to comply with the local laws, Orange offers the unlocked iPhones for 649 euros.

In theory, every German citizen who wants an unlocked iPhone could make a trip to France to buy one from Orange.

But all this locked/unlocked madness is raising another question: does Apple business model is holding water? Or maybe locking a device to a specific mobile carrier could prove unsuccessful in a long term prospect? Will Apple create a new trend and other mobile phone makers will start also to consider selling some of their cutting-edge devices locked on specific networks? Hard to tell!

So far, iPhone sales has gone well as the company managed to sell over 1 million units in just 74 days after its launch in U.S. Also the AT&T has managed to attract a lot of new customers. Indeed, there are no data about iPhone’s sales in Europe, beside a statement of a T-Mobile official who said that 10,000 units were sold in the first day.

On the other hand, Apple’s business model has generated an unlocking race, as various groups of hackers are trying to come up with workarounds to make the iPhone work on any mobile network. This locked/unlocked madness has generated a lot of hype around Apple’s device and maybe, after all, selling a locked mobile phone wasn’t such a bad idea, don’t you think?