O2 on course for 200k UK iPhone sales by early January

It’s fair to say there’ve been a few rumours that the iPhone hasn’t been selling as fast as Apple and O2 would like in the UK. However, just before Christmas O2 tried to dispel the speculation by claiming that it was on course to sell 200,000 of the devices by “early January”.

O2 boss Matthew Key also said that iPhone owners are using the device’s web browsing capabilities, despite it using the sluggish EDGE network. In fact, 60% of UK iPhone users are apparently consuming more than 25MB of data a month, compared to just 1.8% of O2’s customers on other phones. If that figure just relates to network data, it’d be much higher if you include people’s usage over Wi-Fi.

Also, O2 is keen to scotch the rumour that a rival UK operator could bag the 3G iPhone when it comes out this year, with the FT saying he’s “confident” that o2 will have an exclusive on the device too. I wonder why he didn’t say “We WILL have an exclusive on the 3G iPhone”, but that could be just that Key isn’t supposed to be talking up the device publicly for the moment.

(via FT)

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