Without a huge amount of fanfare it has been announced that iPhone will be moving to the Orange network later this year. I have always found the decision of Apple to use O2 exclusively for this long, something of a fault. However, personally I believe this is perhaps because they hadn’t figured on the demand being so high and thus they couldn’t produce at the rate they needed to. It seems lately that the relationship with O2 has become slightly strained especially if my in-store experience was anything to go by…
me: “Have you got any iPhones in?”
O2 person: “No”
me: “When will you have them in?”
O2 person: “We never know. Sometimes Thursday, sometimes Friday. Apple is Apple and if they want to deliver us some stock they will, if they don’t…they don’t. It isn’t our fault”
me: “Can I reserve one?”
O2 person: “No. Why don’t you just go to the Apple Store and buy one?”
It seems from this brief exchange and other friends dealings with O2 that reliability of stock has become an issue. One friend in particular said that O2 had told him that he could no longer the phone he had been waiting a month for because “Apple hadn’t delivered enough stock for months”.
This aside, the expansion of the iPhone into Orange raises really interesting volume discussions. If Orange did combine with T-Mobile as predicted, then 75% of the UK’s PAYM audience would have access to the iPhone. Suddenly, the advent of Jeffery Cole’s famous quote “Everything will move to mobile” becomes all the more interesting. Could everything move to mobile in the next 5 years?
One of the iPhone problems that O2 has suffered is the heavy data usage that the typical iPhone user takes up. Its clear therefore that Orange’s strong data network can take up some of the pressure, plus when combined with T-Mobile’s data network it will allow the burden to be shared even more.
Come 2010, we could all choose to be living in a heavily data orientated iPhone app world, which can only raise even more interesting questions about how advertisers use the mobile platform. 2010 could really be the year of mobile advertising with spend on mobile ads and subsequent revenues rocketing upward.
