Well, to be fair I also couldn't be arsed to pay £100+ to buy out of my current contract in order to move from one shit network to another one...

...it'll be around about October-time that anyone will be able to get one.

Would be very nice indeed if this is true.

We were told at work, that o2 had signed a 5 year exclusivity deal for the iphone(s) And i'm not sure why apple would feel the need to move to orange?

P.S. I neither work for apple or o2.

So O2 spend £10m on advertising over Xmas last year so that Orange can benefit!

Walked past my local Orange Shop today and they were advertising (prominently in the window) free iPod Touches with contracts over £35 a month. I guess this might appeal to the people who want most of the convenience of the iPhone but have a separate phone...

Not sure what this says about this rumour though...

The singaporian situation has nothing to do with the british one.

The deals and the exclusivity T&C that have been signed with AT&T and with 02, Orange and T-mobile (resp. UK, France and Germany) have nothing to do with the conditions for the iPhone 3G and the new countries.

When it comes to the crunch though, who in they're right mind would make a conscious decision to go to orange. I concede that O2 have screwed the launch up for the 3G, but still, there aint enough money in the world to make me go onto orange. They are bottom of the list when it comes to reception and network coverage, and they're customer service is not even laughable its that bad. Apple would be making a mistake going with orange.

Paris cos she knows what i'm talking about

Well there have been quite a few reviews which have come to the conclusion that the iPhone 3G is a bit of a Lemon, as it is marketed by Apple it would make sense for them to team up with Orange and continue the fruit based theme.

mines the one with the satsumas in the pockets

I'm not sure what cells you hang about in Martin, but I've been with Orange for years, and I've had no problem with coverage or customer service.

At work my boss is an avid vodafone fan, and all company mobiles come from vodafone. I've lost count how many arrive either misconfigured, or not configured at all. Message centres not set, WAP/Internet access points incorrect, and the pain of actually trying to speak to someone who knows what these setting should be in unbelievable. I know, cos I'm the poor bugger who has to do it.

I won't mention the crazy things that the vodafone internet gateway does to http request... Lets just say when you write a java app that uses http requests, you really don't want it to go via vodafone!

Sony must be ramping up efforts to get the Xperia out before Xmas, as it's the iphone that those of us who prefer tactile responses and open software ecosystems are waiting for. Orange has always been a strong Windows Mobile shop due to the SPV brand. Apple might be looking to block attempts by carriers looking to punt the Xperia as a serious competitor.

Martin Fowler is spot on.

As a customer of O2 for some time I was very unhappy with the mess they made of the roll out of the iPhone. However, Orange is so bad (particularly customer service) that I wouldn't go to them if they paid me £100 up front and £30 a month, let alone the other way round.

Orange are certainly about to launch iPhone in the UK. I am aware of offers being made to corporate customers from Orange to eval iPhones, not sure of timescales but most likely imminent

I've been a long-time Orange customer, and I'm with them to stay. Unparalleled customer service and you should see the deal I get with them.

This is good news for me. When upgrade time comes around this should fetch a sweet price on Ebay. I hope Palm have a new PalmOS model out by then.

A bit off topic, but I bet Orange UK hate any misassociation with the Orange Group, purveyor of one of South Londons most well known gay venues (Fire - http://www.fireclub.co.uk/) and its Sunday night/Monday morning club night Orange.

If you've ever seen some strange sights around Vauxhall on your way to work you now know why...

did you forget Orange and their Phorm like Deep packet inteception wiretapping for profit!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/12/mobile_phom/

Data gathering on the hoof

By Bill Ray → More by this authorPublished Wednesday 12th March 2008 13:14 GMT

"....

Orange UK apparently "supplies Xiam with data including billing information, mobile browsing logs and purchase history".

Orange assured us that the "browsing logs" only refers to on-portal usage (within Orange World), and "billing information" relates to purchases made from the operator. However, Portal Relevance Manager Jim Small is quoted as saying that 2008 will be the year when the service is "rolled out fully into all download content areas and beyond into browsing content in third-party off portal services".

We asked Orange if it was serious about this, but met with silence. Xiam has the technology to do it, but is understandably coy about what information its customers are using to profile subscribers, as it is the network operator's decision what to collect.

....

"

good grief. I currently get a £35 deal with £15 off each month, 'cos I told them I wanted an iPhone last time round. I wonder if I could keep that deal if iPhone went on Orange...

I do hate Orange though. Despite the nice deal I have at the moment. O2 just seems like a better company all round...

How many Apple fans are currently once again fuming at Apple's management decision to lock phones to specific networks. I have just retired and my wife and I are going to take a world tour. A week here, maybe a month there. Using O2 as the carrier, the roaming charges would be astronomic. If I had an unrestricted iPhone so that I could buy PAYG simm cards in the country being visited I would be very happy iPhone ambassador. As it is, I'm forced to stick to my Nokia. And no I'm not interested in hacking the phone.

all this nonsense about service and contracts. It's like comparing apples with oranges...

Sounds good to me. I'm already on orange, with an iphone (best of both worlds - phone cost only £170, and my 'value promise' plan with orange costs on average a quid a month. Somebody somewhere is losing money, and it's not me ;)

Anyway, does this mean that visual voicemail will work with unlocked iphones on other tariffs?

Rob Haswell: I doubt it'll end up on ebay. I moved from a palm (I've been a fan of them for years, especially after trying the horror that is windows mobile a few times) and the iphone is so far ahead it's untrue. I'd love to think palm will release a huge OS update that gets them back into the game, but I don't see it happening, which would be a real pity.

If the iPhone comes to Vodafone, I'll get one. While I cannot speak for others, I have been with Vodafone for several years and their coverage (3G included) is excellent - way better than the alternatives. Being how good Vodafone are at supporting business customers, I never understood why they didn't take on the iPhone being Apple are moving it in that direction with the support for MS Exchange etc.

What about Blackberry "Thunder" 9500 ? Wouldn't it be nice alternative to iPhone? Rumor has it it's coming to Vodafone this autumn.

Orange have the iPhone from October, true. O2 completely fucked up on their contractual obligations if they wanted to keep their 3 year exclusivity and the move to a subsidised handset was part of the result; Orange is the other part. To be fair to O2 how were they supposed to know they were basically wholesaling iPhones to exporters, unlockers, ebayers etc? well, apart from the fact a goodly proportion of the above are O2 staff, but I digress.

Subsidisation (counter-intuitively) results in a till margin on each iPhone sold of over 5 times what the original gave O2 and Carphone Whorehouse and the lack of a revenue sharing agreement with Apple on the back end (partly due to App Store, partly due to the compromise over missed targets) means that O2 are likely to make around 20x more out of whatever iPhone customers they get before they lose exclusivity than they got out of 1st gen customers, seeing how between 60 and 85% (depending on if you're talking about pre- or post-price drop) of iPhones never turned up on O2 in the first place.

Scott above is correct - orange is already sounding out their bigger corporates about iPhone eval, I guess because they're allowed to under their deal with Cupertino and because the NDA'd team at orange is trying whatever they can to spoil O2's summer. The author of that blog post sure seems confident, no?

Meanwhile, Jobs dives into his vast pile of money and does the backstroke whilst former giants of the telecoms world from Arun Sarin to Finland's only famous entity start to wonder just what fuels his RDF, where he's going next and whether they should adopt-adapt-overcome or simply play the same LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU game they think won the battle against MS, when MS gifted a little unknown concern called HTC with Sendo's SPV designs.

Really? I hope so and believe it when I see it, but the source in the article is a link to a mobile shopping site... would it not be in their interest to get lots of people looking at their site by posting an interesting news story like this?

Second, without pointing the fingers, might it not be in one of the involved parties interests to put this rumour about so that it can keep the other one on their toes?

And following the launch of the iPod touch and being left out of the app store, if o2 are being penalised for not selling enough phones I would feel pretty hard done by: one would assume it was Apple who supplied certain stores with 6 (or something equally ridiculous) on launch day...

However, I could see them being annoyed with the farce the problems with their instore activation system caused (still causing?) on launch - and stores not being able to activate because their macs needed IE6 etc etc...

And now the pricing structure has changed, subsidy, etc, that may have meant a re-negotiation over contracts. And a couple of months exclusivity on the 3G version sounds like a reasonable concession. Though you would've thought that o2 would be hammering the message home at the moment through advertising - but I guess it's hard to advertise something you don't have in stock...

I am all for it - as an Orange customer who's locked in for another 12 months, I want an iPhone now... and I think being on more than one network is good for all as it weakens Apple's strength (the networks can play them off against each other in negotiations now) whilst also expands the reach of the device (and means that there is another player in this area).

Hmm, Nice Girl