iPhone goes Orange on 10 November

2nd Nov 2009 14:58

Mobile phone network operator Orange has confirmed it is to start selling iPhones in the UK from 10 November, thereby ending O2's exclusive hold on the UK market for the wildly successful Apple smartphone.Orange and O2 are not about to engage in a price war this side of Christmas, however, and offer broadly comparable tariffs.Orange is charging £96.50 for a 32 gigabyte (GB) iPhone 3GS hand-set when taken in conjunction with a £44.04 per month two-year contract, while O2 charges just 39p a month more for a £44.05 a month two-year contract.Alternatively, you can get the 32GB iPhone 3GS for free from Orange, provided you sign up for a two-year contract at a tariff of £73.40 per month, which also offers 3,000 minutes per month of free phone calls and 500 free text messages.For less talkative customers, Orange offers a £29.36 per month tariff for the 32GB 3GS which offers 150 minutes of calls per month and 250 text messages, but customers tempted by this offer will have to stump up £225 for the hand-set. Lower down the scale, Orange's pricing looks a bit more tempting in comparison with O2's; the 8GB iPhone 3G, the forerunner to the 3GS, will be available free to anyone who takes out a two-year £29.36 a month contract with Orange, whereas O2's cheapest offering is £34.26 per month on a two-year contract.All the Orange contracts offer so-called 'unlimited' data download entitlements, though as is standard in the industry, the term 'unlimited' is marketing speak for 'quite a lot', with the monthly download cap in Orange's case set at 750 megabytes of data per month.The similarity in tariffs may not necessarily point to a reluctance on the part of the operators to compete on price; industry observers have suggested that Apple, anxious to maintain the iPhone's status as a premium product, may have placed restrictions on the prices it network partners can offer.Next year will see another UK network operator, Vodafone, enter the iPhone market. It has yet to reveal its tariff schedule.O2 still maintains a monopoly on UK availability of the Palm Pre, the smartphone that is seeking to compete with the iPhone in the consumer market and the Blackberry in the corporate market.