iPhone-arama: prices for China and Orange ends UK exclusivity

Woop woop! French-owned operator Orange has announced today that it will being selling the iPhone in the UK later this year - putting an end to the exclusive contract held by O2. In an incredibly terse press release, Orange informed us that it will be selling the phone through all of its channels, and pre-registration is now open. Also, for those who are interested, China Unicom has announced dates and prices for its iPhone launch.

Orange iPhones:

Two operators selling iPhones in the UK? Great! What else do we know?

Uh… that’s it, actually. Like I said, it’s a very short statement. Orange didn’t even give dates, prices or tariffs. So you can go an pre-register if you want, but you have no idea what you’re getting into. Be cautious!

What does this mean?

1) As we discussed before, iPhone owners in the UK, Ireland and America have been getting repeatedly boned for two years now because of exclusive deals and phone locking. iPhone users in other countries don’t have to put up with never being allowed to use their iPhones on another network.

Now, while this announcement doesn’t necessarily mean that exclusivity is being abandoned worldwide, it does mean that for the first time UK customers can easily get a more competitive operator deal on their iPhone. I can only hope that the same thing happens in Ireland soon.

2) Exclusive deals from Apple have tended to cause unnecessary stress and poor behaviour from operators. Partly as a result of this (and mostly over a tiff with Google Voice) the FCC recently made a huge fuss over anti-competitive behaviour from Apple. Since then Apple has greenlit previously delayed applications, and now exclusivity in the UK has gone. We may being to see exclusive contracts with operators start to wind down worldwide.

But that’s a big “may”, as you’ll see from the story below.

China prices:

Back in August, China Unicom confirmed that it had signed an exclusive three-year deal with Apple to sell the iPhone in China. Now it has release some pricing and date info… and boy, they’re not cheap.

Given that at the time Unicom announced it would subsidize the price of the handset, most of use expected the actual device to be fairly reasonably priced. Instead Unicom is hitting it’s customers with a 5,000 yuan price tag - that’s €500 / $730.

That’s just for the device, though. The savings from Unicom start coming in when customers buy monthly tarrifs - which is where Unicom starts providing subsidies. The size of your subsidy scales up with the price of your monthly bill. So the better a price plan you take, the cheaper the device is. Here’s a breakdown of the prices we’ve gotten so far:

Monthly bill of 126 yuan / 12 euro / 18 dollars = subsidy of 893 yuan / 89 euro / 130 dollars
Monthly bill of 886 yuan / 88 euro / 130 dollars = subsidy of up to 4,253 yuan / 426 euro / 622 dollars

For those who are purchasing plans, the final price of the iPhone will probably be split up and paid monthly along with the price plan.