Salivating over the Apple iPhone announced by Steve Jobs this morning? Lick your chops and collect that drool - Apple Australia says it won't be available in Australia until 2008 -- at least a year from now.
Of course, that's not to say there won't be a healthy trade in black-market iPhones on eBay as soon as they're released in the US. Just don't expect to get them cheap.
It'll be released in the US six months from now in June (Apple hasn't even got FCC approval for the hardware yet, such is Jobs' focus on secrecy), then in Europe ‘later in the year' and Asia Pacific in 2008, according to Marketing Manager Rob Small.
Small could not say why the phone would be so delayed in the Asia Pacific region.
Pricing for the phones is not set for Australia, but Apple US said they would cost $US499 ($A639) for a 4GB version and $US599 ($A767) for an 8GB version.
However, it's likely when it does arrive that it'll be on the Telstra GSM network: it is the only network in Australia that supports the EDGE technology the phone uses for highish-speed data transfer (at about 100Kbit/s).
Apple's US-centric approach will also probably see a single carrier deal stitched-up in each region. Apple has already signed up US telco Cingular to distribute the phone exclusively in the US.
Apple's choice of EDGE (2.5G) over the more common WCDMA (3G) mobile technology is probably explained by the substantially faster CPUs available for EDGE devices.
Although Apple hasn't disclosed which CPU it is using in the phone, the likely reason for Apple's choice of EDGE over WCDMA 3G is that the sole manufacturer of WCDMA chips is Qualcomm and they're not nearly as fast as Intel's PXA chips (now divested to Marvell).
The latest PXA320 chip from Marvell runs at 820MHz, and given Apple's heavy graphical functionality in the iPhone, it's likely it has built the phone around this chip.
Until recently, most phone manufacturers have chosen the slowest chip that can viably run their software in order to eke out maximum battery life. Apple appears to have taken a different approach with the iPhone: it will only last five hours of talk/browsing/email or 16 hours of audio playback.