Competitive advantage
Vodafone has announced it will start offering the iPhone 3G and 3GS in the UK and Ireland by early 2010.
The press release is extremely brief and has the air of a ‘me too' announcement after Orange went public yesterday. It's indicative of Vodafone's apparently lesser relationship with Apple that it's not getting its hands on the iPhone until next year, while Orange (and we're still not sure if that means T-Mobile too) will have it this year.
With 3 now the only major UK operator not to make an iPhone announcement, we now, in principle, have competition in the iPhone market. It will be interesting to see if the rival operators compete on price or all charge the same and, if the latter happens, whether there will be talk of cartels.
Vodafone wasn't the only mobile phone operator to issue a press release after the Orange announcement. Just to remind you, here's the O2 announcement:
"We're proud that we've been able to offer an exclusive iPhone deal to our 20 million customers for the last two years. We always knew that iPhone exclusivity was for a limited period of time, but our relationship with Apple continues and will be an ongoing success. We have over 1million iPhone customers and they remain very important to us.
"We aim to offer our customers the best devices on the market, including becoming the home of Smartphones and we are really pleased to now add another device in the Palm Pre. We also offer award-winning customer service and benefits, which is why more people choose O2 than any other network in the UK."
