Across the whole of Christendom, the apple symbolises temptation and original sin. Naughty Eve bit the apple and found - to the enduring shame of humankind - that she and her man were buck naked. Also naked, famously, was the emperor of lore who paraded the streets, showing off his 'new clothes'.

The announcements this week that O2 has exclusivity for the iPhone in the UK with T-Mobile scooping the deal in Germany and Eastern Europe (we're expecting Orange to be announced for France next week) had shades of both of these old tales about them.

We're not talking literally - the concept of original sin seems somewhat flawed, to the Informer at least. But temptation - and the possibility of a disappointing outcome - well the human race is no stranger to that idea. Equally familiar is the lauding of something that proves later to lack the substance it had been thought to have.

The Informer should state here that he is heartily sick of all the furore surrounding iPhone and that may be colouring his feelings on the whole deal. It is, after all, JUST A PHONE.

O2 is offering the phone for £269 and customers are locked in for 18 months. T-Mobile is tying customers in for two years. Two years! By the time the contract's up, the iPhone will be a museum piece.

Think of the advancements in network technology that we'll be enjoying in November 2009, when T-Mobile's iPhone customers finally get a new handset - one that's 3G capable. Of course, customers will be allowed to upgrade before the end of the contract and Apple will doubtless bring out a much-improved, still unsubsidised model for which the customers will happily shell out.

O2 and T-Mobile, everyone believes, will be granting Apple a hefty kickback for the privilege of exclusivity (reports range from ten per cent to 40 per cent) and O2 is even having to upgrade its network to EDGE (in the London area, at least) in time for the November 9th launch. EDGE isn't that expensive, of course. A vendor community insider told the Informer that O2's upgrade cost would be incremental and should be offset by the increase in data ARPU. But that doesn't cut much mustard when you're stuffing 40 per cent of that ARPU straight back to the handset vendor.

Outside of London, UK users won't be able to get any kind of performance, unless they use wifi networks. The cellular experience will suffer by comparison to the wifi experience so much that it's conceivable users will seek out wifi hotspots rather than use the phone's cellular capabilities.

A survey on bbc.co.uk this week revealed that more than 85 per cent of respondents wouldn't buy an iPhone. That may sound damning, but it means that 15 per cent of people would - and that's a lot of people. The fact that there was such a survey at all speaks volumes about the level of interest Apple has drummed up.

But that's the thing about temptation; it's hard to resist. O2 doesn't really need the iPhone, it just believes that the benefits are worth the costs. Users don't really need the iPhone, it's just that it is a very sexy unit. The Informer played with one at the O2 launch and people will want it. The Informer wanted one. Not enough to buy one, mind, but then he's an old skinflint.

He'll never be wealthy enough to be one of those uber trendy early adopters, not if he keeps giving weekly telecoms news away for free. Perhaps he needs to take a leaf out of the British government's book and re-sell something its already sold. Ofcom has located a handy store of old rope in the form of 900MHz spectrum. It was lying at the back of the shed apparently, only Vodafone and O2 are making use of it for 2G GSM services at the moment. The regulator reckons it can be sliced up further and flogged on to the three highest bidders.

Ofcom said: "The consultation looks at how these spectrum bands could be used for 3G and other technologies, and the effect that changing the use of these key spectrum bands could have on competition and consumers."

All the usual suspects have been linked with the, as yet, unavailable spectrum. T-Mobile Orange and 3UK will be the front runners. One source has suggested Google will put in a bid, mirroring its spectrum ambitions in the US, the Informer reckons its more likely that Chelsea FC's multi-billionaire owner Roman Abramovich will put in a bid now the Special One has done the off at Stamford Bridge.

Apparently, Jose Mourinho used the humble text message to tell his senior players he was resigning the night before he did. Now they're all threatening to leave too. It smacks rather of cyber-bullying, something the UK Secretary for Schools, Ed Balls, is dead against. With a surname like that, the Informer reckons it's just as well mobile phones and the interweb weren't around when Balls was at school.

"Cyber bullying is a particularly insidious type of bullying as it can follow young people wherever they go and the anonymity that it seemingly affords to the perpetrator can make it even more stressful for the victim," he said. Bullying isn't big or clever. However, railing against mobile phones and the internet will not to bring it to an end. Frankly, he's talking balls.

Of course, anonymity isn't afforded to all. Particularly if you get your mates to video you kicking in the roof of a £120,000 Lamborghini outside a pub and then Bluetooth it to anyone within range. Naturally, the video was received by friends of the Lamborghini's owner and the perpetrator was promptly busted. Oops.

Deliberately trying to attract attention this week is chip peddler Intel. WiMAX may prove to be a great technology, but it's not as easy a sell as a swish new handset. Nonetheless, Intel was pushing the 'internet in your pocket' concept at its Developer Forum in mean ol' Frisco this week. David Perlmutter, SVP and general manager of the Mobility Group at Intel announced that the firm will deliver WiMAX components for notebooks next year, as well as its own mobile internet devices (MIDs).

Well isn't the terminal market just the place to be at the moment? At Intel's event, open source software developer Canonical showcased a pre-alpha release of Ubuntu Mobile Linux on an Intel Menlow-based MID. Menlow is Intel's first platform designed purely for MIDs and UMPCs. It's not even out until next year and yet Intel was also giving attendees a peak at Moorestown, which will be Menlow's successor.

Rumours that Intel's MID products will be sold unsubsidised to people who have queued so long that their kids don't recognise them any more, and that operators will have to kick back 80 per cent of related revenues, haven't even been started yet.

Intel has also teamed up with Japanese carrier KDDI, the East Japan Railway Company, Kyocera, Daiwa Securities and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi to establish a JV to bid for a Japanese WiMAX licence. The group, calling themselves Wireless Broadband Planning (let's get this party started) is going after a slice of 2.5GHz frequency band for Mobile Broadband Wireless Access System (BWA) in Japan. KDDI ran Japan's first WiMAX field trial last year and is obviously impressed with the results.

WBP also reckons there'll be a global market for such services, and will be looking to establish roaming agreements and/or MVNOs.

We'll all be paying peanuts to roam if Irish startup Cubic Telecom is on the money. The firm this week announced a global phone concept that makes, it promises, "all global calls local calls". Cubic claims to have spent years negotiating with operators across the world to get the best international roaming rates for its MAXroam SIM. This SIM is placed in a dual mode GSM/wifi handset that features full PBX functionality.

While the firm is promising the best international call rates imaginable, it is also promising that all VoIP calls on its network will be free. The handsets, available in two formats, will be out in October, says Cubic, while the standalone SIM will be up for grabs next week at just $40. Nice idea; we'll keep you updated.

Now here's some good news, the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) alliance, a gang of operators that lobbies the bullies and begs the vendor community, is calling for a single standard universal mobile phone charger. With the op/vendor power struggle tipping slightly towards the vendors at the moment, we'll have to see how successful the demand will be.

OMTP: We want a single, universal charger.

Vendor: I bet you do.

OMTP: And we want to give you 40 per cent of our revenues. Or else.

Vendor: Or else what?

OMTP: Or else, er, or else it will have to be 50 per cent.

Vendor: We'll see what we can do. (Smiles, bows and leaves)

OMTP: Well, I think that went rather well, don't you?

A single charger format is such a good idea, and has been such a good idea for such a long time, that it's difficult to believe it has been kept to just an idea. But the Informer was once told by an insider that chargers are used by handset vendors to keep their own suppliers sweet.

There are no benefits to the change in shape of the bit of the charger that goes into the phone. The Informer knows this because the latest one he got, with his Swedo-Japanese handset, the one that keeps turning itself off, broke the other day, completely of its own accord.

Nope they just change them so the component supplier's business doesn't dry up and so the vendors get better deals on other components. Meanwhile, all that money and energy is being wasted on creating, transporting and selling the damn things, which end up in landfills.

Anyway, OMTP has decided on micro USB as its recommended standard. It's such a good idea, that there will doubtless be unending prevarication and debate and we'll carry on filling our cupboards with useless old chargers.

Nokia's big on micro USB, but as everyone else is trying to get into the handset space, the big Finn, as we've seen, is looking beyond the walls of Vendor Gardens. This week, it announced that it had bought mobile advertising specialist Enpocket. The US firm, which was privately held, sells a mobile ad deliver system, which serves ads across MMS, SMS, video and mobile internet inventory. The global advertising market is worth $450bn, while the global handset market, according to In-Stat, will grow to be worth only $250bn in 2011.

And while the mobile share of the advertising market is currently around 0.1 per cent, David Barker, European MD for Enpocket, told the Informer earlier this year that "the brands are demanding access to this world."

Google, rapidly becoming one of the most powerful and least fathomable organisations on the planet also hit the mobile advertising headlines this week, announcing the commercial availability of AdSense for Mobile. The service contextually targets ads to mobile website content, much like the online version does online. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on the record as saying that advertising could one day pay for mobile calls, a view shared by the guys at Blyk, which has been awfully quiet of late. But the firm is having a press conference in London on Monday at which it plans to announce a firm launch date for the ad-funded MVNO, something that has been postponed since the summer.

A couple of weeks back, you may recall, US carrier MetroPCS made a public declaration of its intent to marry Leap Wireless, slapping itself on the thigh like Howard Keel singing 'Bless Your Beautiful Hide'. Well, it looks like throwing a sack over Leap's head and carrying it back to the farm might be the only option open to Metro, as Leap dismissed the proposal in equally open fashion, publishing its own letter of rejection in response.

Sometimes, of course, 'no' means 'yes' and, in this instance, Leap's 'no' means 'yes if you offer me more money'. The coy little minx. Expect the nuptials soon, though, as the US market is about to enter an anti-collusion period preceding the January 700MHz spectrum licence auction. Both companies plan on participating in the auction and they both know they'd be better off bidding as one. The anti-collusion-athon is likely to kick in this November.

More obviously happy together are T-Mobile USA and SunCom, a regional wireless carrier in the Carolinas, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. T-Mobile's UK operation is also loved up, having struck a network share deal with 3UK. T-Mobile's customers can get 3G on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, while 3's mob have got Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. No 3G on Sunday, because it's the Lord's day. Or something.

And we're back to where we began, so that's as good a place as any to round it off.

Take care

The Informer

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