Mr. Steve Jobs finally has his arms wide open to embrace service providers who want to expand with the iPhone. Not that earlier service provides were banned from doing so, but to maintain exclusiveness, select service providers could deal with iPhone in a particular country. The latest deal between Orange and Apple is going to be more fruitful for both the industries bringing hopes to other service providers who always wanted to collaborate with iPhone.
As per the latest agreement signed by both the companies, Orange will now be selling the iPhone in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, and some African markets. While Deutsche Telekom is already selling iPhone in Austria, Vodafone and Orange will market the iPhone in Egypt, Portugal and a few other countries.
Vodafone and Telecom Italia have made plans to sell the iPhone in Italy whereas Vodafone has already announced to supply iPhone to its consumers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.
Other service providers like Mexico’s America Movil and Rogers Communications also had announced their plans to bring iPhones in Latin America and Canada respectively.
Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research, points out that the recent collaborations will lead to “as much as quadruple the market opportunity”.
However, there seems to be a few issues left unexplained by Apple, like its 5-year exclusive contract with AT&T in United States. Also service providers like Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel who are based on CDMA cannot collaborate with iPhone that use GSM. But these do not seem to bog down the Apple CEO as he is planning to conduct an annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco next month where, it is speculated that, he will be making announcements for the release of the fastest and latest cell phone technology known as 3G which will upgrade the iPhone to the next level phone meant for generation next.