Finally, Apple is introducing the iPhone in Europe, yeey, cheer cheer, hand up high and go buy that thing! But uhm, you know, never mind that, start crying, really loud, bang your head against the wall, break a leg, murder someone, the iPhone still has no 3G support. And I wonder, are they really that stupid over at Apple? Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple, I have an MBP, an iMac, an XServe G4 and several other pieces of Apple hardware but I just can’t get my head around this one: which insane idiot at Apple marketing thought it would be a good idea to introduce that phone without 3G on the European market?!
On the European continent there are almost no EDGE networks left, KPN/Telfort fazed it out, Mobistar/Orange fazed it our and all those networks have been replaced by UMTS/HSDPA networks which allow for far faster download speeds and much much much more bandwidth. So what does Apple expect, that all these providers will sudenly and just for the iPhone reintroduce a deprecated network standard, which is a costly investment on top of all the investment costs for the 3G networks? No way, the fact that O2 in the UK does that is quite surprising and I think worth a good laugh, they make themselves look ridiculous from where I’m standing. Even better, how do they expect to still make profit with a 40% revenue sharing, the price they had to pay for the exclusive iPhone contract and the investment costs paired with a new EDGE network. T-Mobile Germany at least already has an EDGE network… But the most bizarre part of it all, if no mobile carrier will sell the iPhone, Apple has a problem too, so instead of just giving in and almost bankrupting the company put up a fight for god’s sake. Fine, sell your soul to the devil but c’mon, there are limits! So for now, most European customers will be bound to GPRS for their data on their iPhone’s. How on earth are we supposed to watch YouTube on our iPhone over GPRS. Browsing the web is already a tad slow with just GPRS, don’t even get me started on the speed at which Google Maps will work, by the time it has loaded the map you’ll have found a nice fish restaurant just by wandering around. But there’s an even bigger problem to this whole issue. The iPhone costs about 400Ä (it should be 290Ä considering the Euro/Dollar exchange rate) and on top of that you need a new plan for voice and data. This is quite an expensive phone and there are a ton of smartphones on the market that sell for less and have much better connectivity possibilities than the iPhone. Frankly, I’m worried this phone won’t sell well on the European market. Of course there are iPhone enthusiasts who will buy it anyhow but the majority of the European customers interested in the iPhone will most likely, just as me, wait for a 3G enabled handset, probably shattering Apple’s sale expectations in the EU.
Anyhow, I’m not an analyst, just someone with his view on things and an opinion of the world. Maybe Apple will prove me wrong, maybe I’ll be right, we’ll just have to wait and see…
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