Orange sees bumper iPhone sales

Mobile phone firm Orange has sold nearly 30,000 iPhones in France, just five days after it was launched.

Mobile companies mostly sell iPhones to customers who take out network contracts with them, a point of contention for some consumers.

About 80% of the phones were sold for 399 euros on a special Orange mobile tariff plan, with 15% sold for 549 euros on a regular Orange tariff plan.

The rest were sold for 649 euros. For 100 euros extra, these can be unlocked.

Some may have been unlocked for use on other networks, but it is not clear how many, Orange says.Orange says that 48% of people buying the phones were new customers for the network.

Court ruling

1. On Tuesday, a German court overturned an injunction that had forced T-Mobile to sell unlocked phones.
2. In the two weeks that the injunction was in place, T-Mobile sold unlocked iPhones for 999 euros, compared with 399 euros for a phone with a two-year contract.
3. The company has not revealed how many unlocked phones it sold at that price but says it did sell some.
4. The exclusive agreements between Apple and mobile operators have caused controversy outside France, with software circulating online that claims to unlock the iPhone.
5. Apple has warned that hacking into the phone's software could render the phones "permanently inoperable" if software updates are downloaded.

Mobile VoIP is here - get used to it

The launch of the Skypephone by mobile operator 3 looks set to change the way the mobile telecoms industry looks at VoIP. So far its attitude has been less than friendly, as evidenced by reports not long ago of orange mobile operators only allowing a VoIP-enabled device onto their networks after it had been knobbled so that users couldn’t access the service.

The device in question was Nokia’s N95 smartphone. Now some operators looked at this VoIP-friendly handset and took an instant disliking. They decided their business models couldn’t handle voice revenues being nibbled at, so using a firmware scalpel they performed a bypass operation. When people objected the operators made a big noise about the quality of the VoIP service not being up to their exacting standards, but essentially they had concluded: cheap mobile VoIP calls over their network equals bad; revenue-earning mobile calls over their network equals good.

3 has put the boot into that model in an attempt to entice subscribers to its network ­ and 3 says it will be trying for both pre-pay and contract customers. Subscribers need to spend £45 for a single 3Skype phone, or £89 for a pair, and then spend at least £10 a month topping it up. If we assume that call quality is OK ­ and 3 says that Skype calls are carried over its network as standard 3G voice calls and then carried over the internet to other Skype users ­ then the future looks bright for 3 and maybe not for Orange at all.