The iPhone: a Naomi Campbell of a product (ou porque é que o iPhone vai tardar a chegar à Europa)
Being an exclusive Cingular product is the best way for Apple to get a decent subsidy: Cingular will be hoping that customers will switch networks just to get the handset, and once they've done so they'll be tied to Cingular for 2 years. Steve is planning on shifting 10m devices in the next 12 months, which is going to mean making deals with more operators unless one in five Cingular customers is going to make the switch.
Doing the same deal in Europe will be much more difficult: European operators have invested heavily in 3G (W-CDMA) networks, and MMS, so to sign an exclusive deal for a non-3G handset which doesn't support MMS would be political suicide; effectively saying that 3G and MMS weren't worth having. If they manage a 3G version of the iPhone then that problem could disappear (and an MMS client shouldn't be a serious problem), but if it drives up the cost then the problem doesn't go away.
[act.: Rumor: 3G iPhone Coming, I Phone vai chegar ao mercado português a tempo da época de Natal]
