French mobile phone operator Orange sell 30,000 iPhones in the five twenty-four hours following its Nov. 29 launch , the company said Wednesday .
In comparison , German wheeler dealer T - Mobile allege it sold 10,000 on Nov. 9 , the day the phone go on cut-rate sale there . Apple ’s U.K. partner O2 sound out the phone is its fastest - selling ever , but refused to give gross sales physique .
Some 80 pct of Orange customers bought the iPhone with an “ Orange for iPhone ” service contract that includes unlimited access to the Internet and the Visual Voicemail service .
Those customers pay € 399 ( US$ 585 ) for their iPhone , the same monetary value T - Mobile charge for its iPhones .
Orange also offers the iPhone for € 549 with other types of contract bridge , or € 649 without a contract bridge .
About 1,500 were sold without a contract , read Orange spokesman Louis Michel Aymard .
Customers bribe an iPhone from Orange for use on another operator ’s connection must pay a € 100 unlocking charge , which is waived if they wait for six months from the leverage particular date . Since an iPhone without a contract is of trivial use on Orange ’s connection , the majority of those 1,500 customers have probably unlocked their phones , Aymard say .
Orange is now the only one of Apple ’s internet wheeler dealer partners to sell the iPhone unlocked . It does so to follow with a Gallic natural law that forbids making the cut-rate sale of one point conditional on the cut-rate sale of another .
T - Mobile briefly offer unbarred iPhones for € 999 to comply with a temporary court enjoinment . It had been sued by rival operator Vodafone , which lay claim that sell the phone tied to a two - year contract breached Germany ’s consumer protection laws . On Tuesday , a court in Hamburg reject Vodafone ’s charge , giving T - Mobile the go - ahead to sell the phone practice bundling with a contract .
Early sales of the iPhone in Europe are dwarfed by its success in the U.S. , where Apple and manipulator better half AT&T sold 270,000 on the first weekend . The U.S. universe is almost four clock time that of Germany , and around five clip that of France .
Apple said it took 74 solar day to sell the first million iPhones following its U.S. launch — a milestone that it take the iPod two years to reach . But sales of mobile phones far outperform those of digital audio thespian like the iPod : Last class , almost 1 billion roving telephone were sold worldwide , 164 million of them in North America and 175 million of them in Western Europe , according to market analyst Gartner .
