The mobile phone carrier O2 has announced that it will be the exclusive carrier for the popular Apple iPhone in Ireland following its successful launch in the UK last year.
The official debut for the device in Ireland is slated for March 14th. The device will sell in O2’s retail stores and also through “Carphone Warehouse” retail stores. The smaller capacity 8GB model of the iPhone will sell for €399 including VAT. The larger capacity 16GB model will retail for €499 including VAT. Obviously the device will work with both Macs and PCs.
The different service plans will be available from O2, with the cheapest beginning at €45. Each plan will have anytime minutes, text messaging and a 1GB data bundle at least.
More details when they become available.
Result for: iPhone
Teosto (Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society) has officially requested that USB drives and mobile phones with MP3 playback function should join the products — such as DVDs and DVRs — with a recording/storage device royalty fee. Teosto has been fighting for the right to add the fees to mobile phones for two years now and now they want both external hard drives and thumb drives included as well. The proposal will now travel to Ministry of Education where the final decision is made.
Teosto has claimed that extensive amounts of copyrighted recordings are copied to both USB drives and mobile phones each year and therefore the composers have a right for a proper compensation. The fees would increase mobile phone prices up to 12,60 euros (approx. $16) for music phones such as the Nokia’s new touch-screen XpressMusic 5800 and presumably Apple iPhone.
Last year the same happened to HD DVD and Blu-ray discs that carry nowadays a fee of up to 1,89 euros per disc.
The proposed royalties for the year 2009 are as follows.
Mobile phones with MP3 playback:
1,4 euros for up to 512MB of internal memory
2,45 euros more than 512MB but up to 1GB of internal memory
3,45 euros more than 1GB but up to 20GB of internal memory
4,15 euros more than 20GB internal memory
Mobile phones that are advertised as music phones (eg. Nokia XpressMusic series, Sony Ericsson Walkman series):
2,4 euros for up to 512MB of internal memory
7,35 euros more than 512MB but up to 1GB of internal memory
[More]>>
Result for: iPhone
According to the former CEO of China Mobile the company still has a strong interest in the Apple iPhone despite talks being cut off in January.
There has been no official explanations for why the two companies called off talks, but the general consensus is that negotiations were cut off due to China Mobile not accepting Apple’s revenue sharing propositions. All other iPhone carriers use some sort of revenue sharing deal with Apple but Chinese businesses are actually hostile to the concept.
China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou however has been quoted as suggesting there is still a chance for the iPhone in China. “As long as our customers want this kind of product, we will keep all options open,” he says. “We have not yet officially begun talks with Apple over the iPhone problem,” he adds however.
The revenue sharing deals can be the least of Apple’s troubles in China however. The 16GB iPhone model costs $499 USD, about double the average monthly salary for a Chinese citizen, and that is not even factoring in the price of a data plan.
