Orange gets UK iPhone deal France Telecom's Orange is to start selling the iPhone to UK subscribers later this year. The company has yet to tell us the date, or pricing plans. But it did issue a short statement which confirmed an agreement with Apple to, "bring iPhone 3G and 3GS to Orange UK customers later this year. Orange globally now offers iPhone …
Orange - pah!
Good luck getting ANY 3G data coverage on Orange at all. One of the reasons why I actually went for an iPhone in the end was that of all the networks, O2 seems to have the best coverage (I was on Orange before with a variety of Nokia and HTC handsets for over 10 years).
Commence the flaming!
giggidy.
I've been saying this would happen all month, it was clear that was the sole purpose of the t-mobile merger, and now we have what we wanted. score one for the orange under-dogs. Now we just wait and see whether they're still going to carry crap tarrifs or if they will do some creative accounting.
So it was exclusive on O2 and now it isn't and Orange have it as well as O2? Does this mean that Vodafone might pick it up as well - or is it exclusive with O2 and Orange now? That might stop the marketing phone calls from Vodafone with HTC magic is better than the iphone and Samsung Jet is better than the iphone....
I wonder what exactly Orange agreed with Apple? As they already cell the iPhone in other countries did they just agree with Apple to let the sell in the UK ? Or did they (Apple) really want to end UK exclusivity as a pilot to ending AT&T's in the US.
I wonder how pissed Apple are at O2, and how the O2 execs are now feeling after this announcement by Orange
I was just wondering how many minutes and texts you get from O2 for your £35 per month, but I was thwarted by O2's website being out of commission … http://www.o2.co.uk/ redirects to http://www.o2.co.uk/assets2/errors/maintenance.html which reads “Sorry, this area of o2.co.uk isn't currently available.”
That'll stop anybody comparing O2's iPhone tariffs with Orabile's.
For £5 you get 150MB of data to consume over a 3 month period. If you don't talk and don't go mad for data then it's a darn good deal. In my case once the 150MB is consumed I'll happily let it chew through the £5 at 30p/MB and then top up again.
Only downside is having to mess with jailbreaks - one day the mobile industry will figure out that we don't want locked-in phones!
Irrespective of how you feel about Orange's coverage, customer service, etc, this is brilliant news. Anything that introduces competition into the iphone market has to be a good thing. You never know, maybe the price will come down...
Like Peter Wilkin, I have to wonder what O2 did wrong to piss off Apple enough. Or perhaps it's just the end of the exclusivity agreement. Either way, good times :)
I've had a play with an orange branded one, here is what it's like
1) The 4 icon dock at the bottom has been removed, it is replace with an orange band
2) Instead of icons being 4x4, they are 3x4
3) On the left is the orange menu, very like the one on the p990, it is unremoveable un changeable. I to the contacts book, the calander, sms messages, the camera and the orange webportal.
4) This side menu appears on all app pages, and the lock screen
5) This orange menu consumes 36mb of ram , and 24% of system resources , constantly -even in lock screen mode
6) Due to the customised nature of the os, regular apple patches don't work, you have to wait for custom orange updates.
What are you complainging about? they've done this for every other phone they sell so why not the iphone?
I've been with Orange for 10 years now, and despite the tendency of my monthly bills to creep upwards by small amounts each month until my yearly "re-adjust my tarrif and sent me the most expensive phone you do for free", I've generally found them very good.
I bought an iPhone from the Apple store and have been using it on Orange for the last 18 months now - first a 3G, then a 3GS. Coverage and data speeds are excellent, and I pay £27 a month for 'dolphin 25' (200 cross network minutes), unlimted texts and 5 gigs of data. Of which I use about 70mb a month.
Can't complain about the price, can't complain about the coverage.
Paw - not sure where you are, I'm on orange and get blanket HSPDA access in London and out to Essex. At worst I might get plain ol' 3G. Even at Reading festival I was getting 3G and good speeds, with all my o2 iPhone chums complaining of slow network access. Probably because 10,000 other people there had iPhones on o2, but hey ho.
Jeffrey - they're generally quite good about not doing that with smartphones, my Hero's completely untouched apart from a splash screen on load. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've owned several non-smartphones with Orange and where that menu is existant, it's also easy to disable.
Anyway, moving swiftly on, this move = good, no matter what network it was. O2 are far too comfortable with the iPhone, and have even been using their iPhone tariffs on their other smartphones, such as the Pre. Now they might actually have to be competitive on pricing.
Maybe this will mean O2 will adjust their attitude. Been trying to buy my wife an iPhone for the last 3 weeks and every O2 store (and carphone warehouse) we go to is out of stock - annoyingly the attitude is:
'no we don't have any, don't know when we will have any, won't reserve one, won't call you when they are in or in fact care that you want to join our network and pay us lots of money. We're a monoply supplier so could spit in your eye and you'd still have to beg us to let you have one'
Been with Orange for 9 years - b0ll0cks to O2 now!
LOL, I was only joking, but it is based on truth,
my last phone on orange was a p990, and their menu did eat most of the system resources, and you could not disable it, drove me mad, until I got a phone shop to hack the firmware to remove it. Also, orange usually released their patches for the p990 several monthe after sonyericcson, and towards the end, they didn't even bother with sony's later patches.
It was the same story with the wifes samsung slider phone.
But hey, maybe they've changed that in the year since I left.
....with O2, will we be able to get our phone unlocked to use with the Orange offering?
I bet O2 are feeling a bit foolish now about not letting iPhone 3G owners upgrade to the 3GS early... would have been happy to enter into a new 18 month contract at that point, which would have locked me into O2 until December 2010. Now, I'm less than chuffed with O2, and look - my contract is up in December 2009 and suddenly there is a new kid on the block!
I left Orange to move to O2 to get an original iPhone. Will be interesting to see what the competition results in..... and, more importantly, who gets the new iPhone next June?
For consumers.
However, I expect that when Orange start selling the iPhone then rather than undercutting O2 prices I reckon that they will do one of 3 things:
"investigate the economics" and determine that the prices charged by O2 are the best possible given the prevailing market forces and therefore charge the same,
Deliver a completely different set of minutes/texts/services which will make direct comparison pretty much impossible or
Charge massively different between the handset and the monthly rentals which will work out pretty much the same over 2 years as O2.
O2's data network should improve over time though. (and Orange's foul up I expect).
"One of the reasons why I actually went for an iPhone in the end was that of all the networks, O2 seems to have the best coverage"
Where were you when OFCOM spent millions (probably) on compiling this then http://www.ofcom.org.uk/radiocomms/ifi/licensing/classes/broadband/cellular/3g/maps/3gmaps/coverage_maps.pdf
You should have saved them the money and just told them that O2 have the best network... oh, except of course what you're saying is bollocks as O2 officially have the lowest coverage in the UK, with Orange 2nd only to Three.
Orange's Data network can't even cope with their Blackberry service right now. The t-mobile merge won't come soon enough for them to be able to avoid some serious crashing in the new year.
The most likely option is that Orange/Apple (or Fruit Salad as they should be known) will cut the prices (O2 at the same time) and also promote and push other Apple products.
It's just giving you a choice of which network is going to extort money from you to fund their overpaid CEO's. Nice phone though...
"(He's just taken out a new contract with his 3GS with O2, despite not liking their service)."
As O2 are online, if he has purchased the phone he has 7 days from the date of delivery to return it (distance selling regulations).
I don't think this will introduce competition at all though, Orange will sell the phone at the same price over the same contract length, for the same tariff, all it will do is give another provider of the same phone so Orange will cut down on their other mobile phones (cause everyone wants an iphone... ) leading to *less* competition, at least phone wise.
They are not a fit home for Smartphones, largely due to their hilariously ripoff data roaming plans.
Don't want to pay the hideous data roaming charges? Well, you can buy 10Mb extra for about a tenner... but you can only buy one, and they won't tell you when it runs out. Going somewhere like Moscow? The only "bundles" are 50Mb+ MONTHLY - no one-off bundles available at all.
I'm tied into my contract at the moment, but I'll be gone from Orange before I next leave the country. I would have actually paid more, and happily, if I'd been able to use google maps abroad rather than being forced to turn off data roaming on my Android handset.
I've had exactly the same experience on Orange with an LG Renoir
- they've installed a whole bunch of demos in the 'my applications' folder which you can't delete (and always appear above the ones you've installed);
- they've deliberately crippled Google Maps so that it doesn't work with the GPS (in a an attempt to make you pay for their mapping service ... which won't actually work on the phone)
- and they've put six favourite links in the browser which you can't delete or move and always appear at the top of the favourites list
- you have to be pretty techie to be able to change the home page from Orange world)
- they have only just released the latest firmware pathc - 9 months after LG released the base version.
Thank god my contract expires in November.
I agree this is good news for everyone. I think all things being equal O2 will keep me as I will switch to SIMplicity at £20/mo. when my contract is up in January using the PAYG iPhone 3GS I bought on launch day (yes it works out as cheaper, if you don't care about visual voicemail), and I also have their broadband; it'd be £60pa more expensive if I didn't have a phone.
But it keeps O2 on their toes, and reinforces to me their stupidity in not locking in all those would-be upgraders for the 3GS; the 3G people's contracts will roll off in January, and they'll drop nicely into a competitive market. I can only assume they've been busy negotiating and hoped in the summer that they would retain exclusivity, as otherwise it's remarkably stupid.
People did point this out in June, of course, when the contract nazis were going on about how unreasonable it was for iPhone owners to expect some deal: they could have locked in their most price-insensitive customers for at least 18 months. Some will have done it anyway, through clenched teeth. Some will have done what I did and split out the phone from the contract, counting the days. And some will have just been p'd off, and will now be delighted. Well, congratulations O2, you won that battle. Pity about the war though.
Interesting that Steve Jobs, a really smart individual in so many ways still has this cockamany "exclusive" attitude towards his little iPhone. What he needs to do is look in his rear view mirror - the competition are not just closing on him, they're in a higher gear. If I were Apple I would have opened the door to all network operators to sell the baby before it falls out of the pram and is replaced by a nicer looking and less fussy infant.
No, it isn't the end of chat.
Vodafone having spectacular coverage isn't going to matter one bloody jot if I can't get coverage in my house. Who relies upon getting coverage in every corner of the UK? No-one. You pick the network with the best coverage *in your area* based around what you do with you life. For me, that's O2 by a fair margin. Tried Orange and Voda, never got reception in my living room, one bar upstairs in the bedroom. Useless!
All these cheap contracts that people mention sound great, well done for getting them. Quick question, is free unlimited* Wifi access included in the tariff? What about MMS, are they an extra, or do they come out of your allowance? Since Orange are doing a deal with T-Mobile, they'll probably supply the wifi, and seeing as that's an extra £20/month for unlimited, the tariffs suddenly start to look OK, and yes, to get FULL use of some the iPhone features (iTunes, downloading larger apps from the App Store to name a few off the top of my head) then you do kind of need it. Not forgetting that phone is *partially* subsidised (alright, not by much!). I'll admit that there are some irritating about O2's services, such as service outages, coverage, tethering (if enough people complain to the right authorities, then they'll be forced to change that), but having swapped from Orange about a year ago it surprises me to hear people say that their customer service is poor. It's spectacular next to what Orange provided me with - the signal where I live is an order of magnitude better (I *actually* get one!).
*OK, I know that O2's idea of unlimited is entirely different to that of some of you, but what do you people want to download?!
You're forgetting something, the competition tried to beat the iPod but guess what? when any mp3 player is being tested the iPod is still the benchmark.
Sure, plenty of other players have more features, many of them sound better but where is the alternative mp3 player that has an established hugely popular application store?
One store gives you TV and movies (purchase and rental), lots of useful applications and games, plus lots of music. Nobody else has the same amount of selection in a easy to use package.
Even if you don't buy anything or download anything, you still have an music and media player that is one of the best to use.
Apple won't roll over and let Orange ruin the iPhone, I suspect the reason Orange took so long to get the iPhone was due to Apple holding out on them until they agreed not to mess with the software.
It's about time someone stood up to the greedy mobile operators.
Since when did competition make Apple products cheaper? You can by a Mac in several shops on the high street and web based stores but the prices are within a few pounds of each other. Same is true for ipods.
I'm going with Lee on this one, Orange will either price the phone the same as O2 and hope their brand attracts customers or they'll use a completely different tariff structure to make it impossible to compare the two.
Currently Orange customer thinking about ditching to O2 to get a 3GS. Think i'll take orange up on their offer as long as the interface and menus aren't completely crippled by them. I'll have a play with an orange branded one and if it's not destroyed, i'll stay. Apple are notorious for controlling their products, so maybe Orange had to back down on this one and see that I don't care about their shovelware.
Now that the iPhone is on a network NOT made up of tin cans and string then maybe we'll stop hearing the shrill cries of the fanbois defending O2 when it goes down (again)
Personally as long as it doesn't stop Orange offering handsets that I actually want then I couldn't really care less.
Frankly, Orange are shite, have been since FT bought them so good luck with that, but after the grief of the last Apple update (not just mine other peoples too) I'm inclined to say that the Jesusphone is also utter shite, Android's the way forward.
Alien because it seems to be what testing is for the Apple software development team.
" Have you ever tried using the O2 online store? I hear internet commerce is the coming thing..."
I'm not a complete idiot you know. There are two problems with the online store:
1) They were also out of stock
2) Lots of things are going missing from my post at the moment (may be due to the strikes round my way). A selection over the last 4 weeks:
- 2 x credit cards (sent separately at different times)
- 1 x cheque from insurance company
- 1 x card pin notification (not the same as the credit card though)
- 1 x package with car parts (front brake caliper bolts if you're interested)
The likelihood of an iphone arriving unmolested to my house at the mo is pretty low!
@Simon - I have wifi at home, and in the office, and if I'm out and about there are innumerable coffee shops that I know of that provide free/cheap wifi. So having free access through 'The Cloud' isn't a big issue to me.
Orange possibly aren't the best network to get the iPhone, and it's moot for me because I just took out an 18 month contract on a phone, but more competition can only be good. The handset will still be prohibitively priced, but perhaps O2 will finally get round to upgrading their 3G network to compete.
Indeed. I went into the 02 shop the other day looking for a smartphone type of thang to replace my Touch HD. I told the monkey I didn't want a JesusPhone and he tried to get me to take a vintage HTC handset rebranded and recased (probably an original Touch looking at it!).
When I asked if they had anything a bit more, you know, current, the only option was an iPhone. Take it or leave it. So I left it.
In Orange's defence, although their customer service is second to all they have the best phones when it comes to 'serious' devices.
I was with Orange for 18 months, just before the end of my contract, I moved home.
I was not able to make phones calls in my Home any more. When I asked Orange, they told me that was normal. Nice
And only live three miles from a large Town.
O2 are not great but I can just use it in my home if needed.
And don't get me started on how bad o2 data service is
Greg D says:
"Vodafone having spectacular coverage isn't going to matter one bloody jot if I can't get coverage in my house. Who relies upon getting coverage in every corner of the UK? No-one. You pick the network with the best coverage *in your area* based around what you do with you life. For me, that's O2 by a fair margin. Tried Orange and Voda, never got reception in my living room, one bar upstairs in the bedroom. Useless!
True true. But I think you'll find it's MY HOUSE. No wonder my leccy bill is so high.
Personally the IPhone is not my thing and I am not looking forward to more IPhone users not only arguing over the fact their phone is better than everyone elses but now that their network/tarrif is better than other IPhone users....
What with the New Orange/T-Mobile Joint venture soon to be in effect I think the Orange network will give the much hated O2 network (by me anyways) a good ol kick in the arse.
Yeah, it's the vagaries of the cellphone networks for sure that lead to these sorts of experiences. I was happy with Orange while I was living in Stoke-On-Trent, but after I moved to Birmingham and then later to Basingstoke, my Orange phone (well, phones plural, as I upgraded over the years) always had worse coverage than my partners phone on O2 or my work phone on Voda when I had one.
I've been really happy with O2s coverage where I use it, but that's the point - it's where you use it that the coverage matters, not an Ofcom map; a network might have 99.9% coverage, but if you live and work in part of the 0.1% area, that network is useless to you and you may as well go for one that has 98% coverage, but you're *in* that 98% area.
Get over yourself. Is there really any need to be like that? Nobody else's who's commented has been nasty about their experiences, but I guess that's why you're an Anonymous Coward isn't it?
Other than that, I refer you to my previous comment:
I've been really happy with O2s coverage where I use it, but that's the point - it's where you use it that the coverage matters, not an Ofcom map; a network might have 99.9% coverage, but if you live and work in part of the 0.1% area, that network is useless to you and you may as well go for one that has 98% coverage, but you're *in* that 98% area.
Why is The Register and every other media outlet so breathless with this news? I was always given to understand that Apple's iPhone exclusivity contract with O2 was likely to come up for review after two years, similar to the deal with AT&T in the US. It's standard business practice, after all. Maybe I made it up. Oh no, hang on: I read something about it in The Guardian in August last year: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/01/telecoms.mobilephones
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