Appletell

On the heals of the iPhone’s geographic expansion in Europe, the iPhone is making it’s official entrance into Asia.

Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel) will bring the iPhone to Singapore, India, Australia and the Philippines later this year (read, iPhone 2 with 3G speeds).

This is probably the only way to curb the massive knockoff problem that is currently going on in Asia. Further, a 2.5G iPhone is of no or little interest to countries and carriers with 3G networks.

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The iPhone is finally rapidly expanding into more worldwide markets. Vodafone has just made an announcement stating that it has signed a contract with Apple, and will start selling iPhones in 10 new countries: Australia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey. No specific date has been given, but expect the phone to be out later this year.

The fact that Apple has chosen Vodafone for all 10 of these countries speeds up the process of deploying the iPhone. It means Apple doesn’t have to deal with 10 different carriers for each country, as they have previously. Apple chose AT&T in the US, O2 in the UK, Orange in France and T-Mobile in Germany. It’s good to see Apple meeting their goals with bringing the iPhone to the rest of the world, especially where it has huge demand. This should also prevent iPhones being exported from the US, and being hacked to work on local networks.

Via [Engadget]

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ifoAppleStore is reporting that a third Apple Store in Australia is being planned. An Apple Store in Sydney is currently under construction, and a store in Melbourne is planned for the Chadstone Shopping Centre. This third store will be built in Chatswood, in the North of Sydney, inside the Westfield Chatswood shopping mall. Job listings for this store have already been posted, and the store could be open by October this year. Apple is slowly paying attention to the rest of the world. A lot of its services like movie rentals are still USA-only, and the iPhone isn’t available everywhere yet. But Apple has been active in Europe a lot recently, launching iPhones in the UK, France, Germany and more.

Via [TUAW]

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