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. 

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]

According to an ArsTechnica report, Apple COO Tim Cook’s promise earlier this year that the iPhone is headed to India “some day” seems to be coming true.  As this is still a rumor (this information was leaked from Apple and Vodafone inside sources), there is very little information about the release, other then that it will cost 27,200 rupees ($685) and 28,000 rupees ($710) for the eight and sixteen gigabyte versions, respectively.  Vodafone and Apple would probably be pretty happy if these were the prices, as they are both fairly large markups from the price paid in the US.  No other information about quantities, terms of the deal, targets, etc. has been released, but the official release date is rumored to be sometime in September.  An announcement by either Apple or Vodafone has not been made, but one is expected soon to talk about the veracity of these claims.  Also included in the rumored deal is rights to the iPhone in Australia. 

Via [Infinite Loop]