thomas fitzgerald.net

One of the persistent rumors about the next generation iPhone, apart from it having 3G is that it will adopt a different selling model, more akin to the iPod, in that it will be available without contract and without being locked by revenue sharing deals to a single carrier. In other words you’ll just be able to go into a shop and buy one. Engadget is reporting this morning that sources have “confirmed”t hat Italian telecoms provider Telecom Italia plan to offer the 3g iPhone under such a model.

This offers Apple something of a conundrum if it does switch to an unlocked phone model. On the one hand, it will solve the unlocked iPhone grey market problem, but on the other hand most people with legit iPhones will be only at best half way through their long contracts which then wont apply to newer iPhone customers. Now, for most people this won’t be too big a deal, but you just know that a large, vocal proportion of a certain segment of the internet will cry blue murder over this. For Apple it would seem to make business sense though. Clearly there is a high demand for non carrier locked iPhones. Im sure they have weighed the potential sales against the revenue they are getting from the revenue sharing sales model. And yet rightly or wrongly there will be a backlash

People will argue that Apple is finally “doing the right thing” but will decry the existing users left tied with a locked phone, but in fairness it will be less Apple’s problem and more one for the service providers. The issue will likely come down to how the carriers will handle it. I am on O2 here in Ireland. I have a fully legit iPhone contract and my phone isn’t so much as jailbroken. If Apple launches the iPhone 3G in June as some predict, the iPhone will have only been available here for a little over three months, and will promptly become obsolete. I have always been an early adopter, so Im not that cut up, but if O2 decide to prevent people from buying upgrades because of their 18 month contract, even though the phone was not subsidized in the first place, there will be a lot of unhappy people out there, and I suspect the same goes for the UK, France and Germany. At least in the US it will have been out for almost a year at that stage, but then the AT&T contract is a two year contract too. If it is truly unlocked then there should be nothing to stop you just transferring your sim to a new phone, but some carriers have different sims for 3G and 2G devices so it may not work without changing sims, which they may be unwilling to provide because of contracts. After all, why would they want to keep paying revenue sharing on your phone if you’re no longer using it.

People have been pretty emotional about the iPhone since it was first announced and reaction has tended to be extreme. I have no doubt that whatever Apple does, the launch of the much rumored 3G version of the Apple handset will attract as much extreme opinion. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

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