The short period in which T-Mobile has offered unlocked
iPhones for 999 euros in Germany
ended today after a state court in Hamburg
had lifted the injunction obtained last month by Vodafone.
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?
