25,000 Buy iPhone 3G in UAE, Saudia Arabia– Without Texting, Web Browsing in Arabic
7:47 am, February 23rd, 2009, Nicole Martinelli
The iPhone 3G launched today in United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Some 25,000 people signed up in the first few hours, not bad considering you can’t send or recieve text messages in Arabic and the web browser does not yet render Arabic text properly. (Mobile providers have promised that these services will be available within the next three months.)
The 8GB iPhone costs around $600, 16GB around $700, with a monthly fee of about $25. Mobile provider Etisalat also throws in a hundred texts a month, to thumb perhaps in French or English while you’re waiting for Arabic.
Via Arabian Business
Image courtesy ifone4arab
Posted by Nicole Martinelli in iPhone 3G | Comment on this article
If you enjoyed this article:
Subscribe via RSS or email, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter














If you check the article you link to the figure of 25k is only for KSA, not UAE. AFAIK there are no figures out for UAE.
And take that figure with a grain of salt. The article says, “In just a few hours of launch the number of walk-in customers and those who applied online reached 25,000″
Does that mean that all those who “booked” an iPhone 3G in KSA online since they opened that registration a week or two ago are included in that number? If so, did all of them actually buy one yesterday? I doubt it.
In UAE there was no pre-booking of iPhone.
Magnus, on February 23rd, 2009 at 9:43 am
[...] Martinelli posted on Cult of Mac a story linking back to this piece at ArabianBusiness.com, which in turn references information at the [...]
Confusing UAE KSA iPhone Sales Numbers Confuses Writers : Shufflegazine - Apple Lifestyle Magazine, on February 23rd, 2009 at 10:22 am
Pls excuse my ignorance, but is that how the app icons look like on their version of the iPhone? If so, why?
MacSheikh, on February 24th, 2009 at 2:05 am