25,000 Buy iPhone 3G in UAE, Saudia Arabia– Without Texting, Web Browsing in Arabic

25,000 Buy iPhone 3G in UAE, Saudia Arabia– Without Texting, Web Browsing in Arabic

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

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Image courtesy ifone4arab

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nicole_martinelli

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

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Posted in iPhone 3G |

  • http://www.shufflegazine.com Magnus

    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.

  • MacSheikh

    Pls excuse my ignorance, but is that how the app icons look like on their version of the iPhone? If so, why?