Via ars technica: “O2 wins Apple iPhone deal - at a hefty price”

O2 is understood to have agreed a margin on the retail price - to be confirmed tomorrow - but will return to Apple as much as 40% of any revenues it makes from customers’ use of the device.

O2’s logic here appears to be: “Sure, this deal screws us over, but it downright rapes all the competition!”

Seems a bit of a desperate move to me. They’re smart enough to recognize that jumping on the iPhone bandwagon makes for some good publicity, but 40% is daring to say the least. As I understand it, AT&T pays 10%, and for regular phones, carriers don’t pay any portion at all.

The long-term winner here is clearly Apple, not O2 (nor any other “partner”). The customer has little reason to care, assuming this doesn’t result in significant increases of subscription fees (in which case O2 will suffer even more from this potentially fateful decision). The Apple investor, though? Yum.

Har dee har har.

Ex-Apple employee Mike Evangelist analyzes and comments on the iPhone discount backlash situation. Key quote:

During my time at Apple, I was involved in several situations where it was necessary for Apple to attempt to balance the expectations of existing customers, potential future revenue, and costs. In all cases, the decisions were weighted heavily towards what was ‘right’, with what was cheapest or easiest given far less weight.

Emphasis mine.

Traditionally, I’d count Nokia among the more innovative cellphone makers, certainly more so than Palm or Motorola. To their credit, for instance, they delivered the first WebCore-based browser in a cellphone long before Apple did with Safari on the iPhone.

What they did today, though, shatters that idea. Perhaps they were just as conceited about their market position as Palm’s CEO was, just not as vocal about it, and equally overwhelmed by the iPhone’s success?

I have no real other explanation for how this could have happened.

Okay, so it requires a special mirror because the camera is normally on the backside of the phone. There’s also no code or binary yet, nor even some info on how many fps they managed to achieve… nevertheless, this photo:

…intrigues me.

More info.

Via Buzz Andersen.