German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom has found a way around a court order which forces it to sell unlocked iPhones. The solution is quite simple: its T-Mobile wireless provider now indeed sells an unlocked iPhone, but it costs almost $1,500 a piece.

"We will review the ruling and decide within the next 48 hours how to react," said Alexander von Schmettow, a T-Mobile spokesman.

Of course, this is more or less a defiance of the court order stemming from a suit brought by Vodafone, which lost a bidding war to its greater rival for the exclusive right to sell the iPhone in Germany. The court injunction, which T-Mobile is appealing, states that Apple's German wireless partner must offer the iPhone without a required 24-month contract. The price of the phone with the wireless subscription is the equivalent of $592 (399 euros), whereas an unlocked iPhone is now sold by a stunning 1,000 euros.

"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 in an interview in for Frankfurter Rundschau. Joussen said he expected a substantive ruling within two weeks.

Apple's U.K. partner is O2 while Orange, the rebranded France Telecom, won the exclusivity deal in France, where the iPhone goes on sale on Nov. 29. In Germany, the gadget has been available since Nov. 9.

A smaller player wants to jump in the iPhone bandwagon: Germany's third-largest mobile phone services supplier, debitel AG, announced it may launch a special service package for iPhones. Of course, they are targeting illegally unlocked iPhones, because at $1,500 a piece, I can hardly see more than a handful unlocked headsets sold by T-Mobile.

Orange also plans a similar scheme to that applied by T-Mobile to avoid legal problems, with its "unlocked" phone also expected to retail at €999. In Europe, laws and courts do not favor as much as in the U.S. large companies over smaller businesses and end users.

Unlike other handset makers, Apple has managed to lure the telecom giants into signing a contract for iPhone’s distribution, according to which the carriers must share their iPhone-generated revenues with the Cupertino, CA-based computer manufacturer.

Although there is little known about the terms of agreement between Apple and mobile carriers there were rumors that the deal allegedly stipulates that carriers will provide Apple with 10% of the revenues made from calls and data transfers by customers over iPhones. Also, before iPhone was announced for Europe there have been reports that Vodafone refused to share its revenues with Apple.