Ya gotta love those European courts. T-Mobile said today it will sell the iPhone in Germany without a contract in order to comply with an injunction issued by a court hearing a lawsuit brought by rival Vodaphone. If you want it without a contract, you can have it for 999 Euros, or more about $1,477 given today's exchange rate. With a contract it will go for 399 Euro, or about $590.
The issue is exclusivity. Vodahone is challenging the right of T-Mobile and Apple to offer the phone on an exclusive basis, which sounds a lot like the one big complaint that consumers in the U.S. had when the iPhone first hit the market: They didn't like that it worked only on AT&T. Funny how you don't hear that complaint all that much of late. Additionally. Vodaphone is challenging T-Mobiles practice of selling the phone with a so-called SIM lock that prevents SIM cards from other networks from working in the phone.
It seems to me the easy way to answer the problem might be to allow basic phone features -- voice calling and text messaging -- to work when another SIM is used, but to not offer support for specialized features, when the non-preferred SIM is sued. Visual voice mail is one that comes to mind.
Either way, most German consumers who want an iPhone will probably vote with their wallets and take the T-Mobile contract, while the courts hem and haw for months until its too late for any final resolution of the complaint to matter. By that time, we'll be talking about a third-generation iPhone and recalling how quaint the first one was.
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