Technology

Orange – the French mobile phone service – began selling unlocked iPhones on November 29th and since than they have sold 30,000. In five days they have made more than T-Mobile has in a month. Customers found it easier to purchase the phone with the ‘Orange for iPhone’ contract – which gives them unlimited amount of time on the internet and the brand new Visual Voicemail service.

Customers buying an iPhone from Orange for use on another operator’s network must pay a €100 unlocking charge, which is waived if they wait for six months from the purchase date. Since an iPhone without a contract is of little use on Orange’s network, the majority of those 1,500 customers have probably unlocked their phones, Aymard said.

Orange is now the only one of Apple’s network operator partners to sell the iPhone unlocked. It does so to comply with a French law that forbids making the sale of one item conditional on the sale of another.

T-Mobile briefly offered unlocked iPhones for €999 to comply with a temporary court injunction. It had been sued by rival operator Vodafone, which claimed that selling the phone tied to a two-year contract breached Germany’s consumer protection laws. On Tuesday, a court in Hamburg rejected Vodafone’s complaint, giving T-Mobile the go-ahead to sell the phone bundled with a contract.

Early sales of the iPhone in Europe are dwarfed by its success in the U.S., where Apple and operator partner AT&T sold 270,000 on the first weekend. The U.S. population is almost four times that of Germany, and around five times that of France. Apple said it took 74 days to sell the first million iPhones following its U.S. launch – a milestone that it took the iPod two years to reach.