It didn’t take long for a French retailer to begin selling ‘unlocked’ iPhones, following a recent court ruling in that nation. FNAC Friday began selling the popular Apple handset without the usual carrier contract.
Despite the rather steep prices (an 8GB iPhone sells for the equivalent of $1,122), the FNAC offers seems to be the first to take advantage of a ruling by France’s Competition Council temporarily striking down the practice of requiring contracts tied to carriers.
Earlier this month, the competition board described Apple’s 2007 exclusive deal with France’s Orange carrier a “serious and immediate” threat to broader competition.
Bouygues Telecom SA, the nation’s No. 3 carrier which brought the original claim to the exclusive arrangement with France Telecom. Since the 2007 deal, Orange has sold 450,000 iPhone 3Gs and 150,000 of the first-generation handsets.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
