In the U.S., Cingular has the market sewn up when it comes to iPhone thanks to the exclusive rights Apple secured with the operator to keep tabs on the product and exercise greater control over the service offering. But in the U.K. the market is wide open, with all the major mobile operators - O2, Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile – in the running for exclusive rights, according to this article in The Times. Apple is expected to offer the iPhone exclusively to only one operator when it launches in the U.K. at the end of the year.
O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, is “understood to have held preliminary talks with Steve Jobs...about a potential tie-up in Britain and Europe.” A perfect match may have been Hutchinson’s 3, the mobile media company and mobile operator that already has a sizable chunk of the music download market. However, since the iPhone is not 3G-compatible, 3 is ruled out as a contender.