Apple iPhone `Subsidized' by Cingular, Says Who?

[Nils Holland]

Jesús Díaz Blanco schrieb:
> Dunno here, but in amazon germany they are lining up for 999 euro  
> unlocked units.
>   

I've been watching this for quite a while. It remains to be seen if 
Amazon.de uses this as a cheap form of advertising, or if they will 
really be able to ship what they promise. I guess that if Apple decided 
to exclusively partner with, say, T-Mobile or Vodafone here in Germany, 
then Amazon.de won't be allowed to sell "unlocked" units (and there 
probably won't be any unlocked units available in the first place).

At least there's no risk with pre-ordering. You can always cancel your 
order, and should they ever ship, you can always send it back after 
receiving it if you decide that 999 Euro are too much. Or you just put 
it up on eBay, probably you can sell it for more than you paid for it. ;-)

(Hints on phones with special vendor-bounds in Germany: A few years ago, 
the provider E-Plus exclusively launched some smart-gadget-like phone 
called "i-Mode", originally coming from Japan. Just like the iPhone, an 
i-Mode phone would only work on E-Plus' network. The whole thing failed 
miserably - not so much because of the provider-locks, but because the 
device and service sucked very much from what I heard. Of course, this 
doesn't justify any conclusions regarding the iPhone's success - 
i-Mode's failure here in Germany was caused because it was basically 
taken 1:1 from Japan to Germany and not - feature-, service- and 
probably design-wise, modified to better suit the German market. In July 
2006, E-Plus then announced to stop the i-Mode Service. O2, who 
originally wanted to license i-Mode from the Japanese owner company as 
well, stepped back from their plans way earlier already. (See: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode)).

Greetings,
Nils