In Poland Orange Hired Actors To Stand In Line For iPhone

By Irene Collins
20:43, August 22nd 2008

Because France Telecom's Orange is concerned that Polish customers won’t que to get their hands on the newly relesed iPhone they hired a group of actors to pretend they’re interested in the product. The Apple iPhone will go on sale in Poland on Friday.

The mobile phone operator Orange has told Reuters that nearly two dozen stores in the country were surrounded by actors in anticipation of Friday's iPhone launch.

"We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone," an official from Orange said for Reuters.

The company tries to recreate the stir that surrounded the iPhone launch in US, where the crowd actually gathered long before the phone was out for sale.

The strange thing is that Orange Poland hasn’t even published the prices for the telephone yet. This is even more obvious because T-Mobile, the other operator selling iPhones in Poland, have no lines yet at their stores.

Meanwhile in India there’s no hysteria regarding the notorious device. Indian telecommunications majors Bharti Airtel Ltd and Vodafone Group PLC launched the third-generation Apple iPhone Friday across India, the world's fastest growing mobile phone market.

At 30,000 rupees ($690), the iPhone 3G costs almost triple its price in the United States, where it is subsidized by telecommunications operator AT&T Inc in its effort to win customers' annual subscription fees.

The high price did not seem to deter Indian customers with would-be owners visiting showrooms in New Delhi and its outskirts and in the business hub of Mumbai early Friday, the IANS news agency reported.

Rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone simultaneously launched the iPhone in at least six major Indian cities at midnight.

Airtel had received 200,000 pre-bookings for the phone, president Sanjay Kapoor was quoted as saying by IANS. The iPhone in India is locked to the service provider so the user cannot switch operators.

India is an attractive market for handset makers with about 6 million to 9 million new subscribers every month. The country added 6.42 million new mobile users in July, taking its total of mobile subscribers to 292 million, according to the Cellular Operators' Association of India.

India's total subscribers is second only to China, where the iPhone has yet to be launched. A majority of the mobile handset market in India, estimated to be more than 70 per cent, is cornered by the Finnish firm Nokia Corp.

India does not yet have 3G networks, which support the iPhone's high-speed browsing and downloads, but they are likely to be available within a few months.

There are already more than 30,000 iPhone users in India using the second generation of iPhones, which were bought abroad or in the grey market in India, Kapoor said. They are available for 18,000 to 20,000 rupees.