Orange gets French iPhone in November

I'm trying to find a french language pack to use on a 1.02 hacked iphone. Ilang has french, but not very compleat. Calander only.

@ basscadet, no it isn't. As long as Apple plays its "cat & mouse" game they may lock your phone with the next firmware upgrade and you'll have to wait again till someone finds a way around it. I'm not planning to buy a phone that can lock me out at any given day.

Besides that the next big iPhone news would be an unlocked phone. In Belgium they can't sell locked phones (I live there) and as far as I understand Australia, Italy and Canada have the same legislation so will we have to wait longer (after Nov 9th) or will Apple sell unlocked phones at a higher price? Maybe, just maybe, we don't get the iPhone at all, would Apple care about a market with only 10.000.000 possible customers?

thanks to ebay one can simply get one from the US and thanks to hackers one can also use it with any network they like. Only thing missing is visual voicemail and any new features introduced with a firmware update (that will be cracked after some time anyway). End of story.

Nice to hear that Belgium might get the iPhone but have to confess that I was under the impression that it would be impossible to launch the product here due to the local laws that prohibit lock-in. Honestly, I'm a British national who still can't speak the local languages so I'm missing a lot on the subject but it's interesting news nonetheless and I hope it's right. Mind you, this might mean that the price is bonkers.

On a related subject, what happens with voicemail when you are roaming? In the US with AT&T you get your visual voicemail, but what happens if you roam to another country? Do you get visual voicemail there as well? Do we expect the rollout of the iPhone across Europe to make a difference to this if you roam around the supported region?

@Sam: Vodafone and SFR are the same, or it's rather Vodafone who has shares, and SFR who sells Vodafon branded services (I still wonder when the Name change will come over like what happened in Italy with Omnitel ). There are 3 Providers Orange (ex-France Telecom) / SFR-Vodafone / BouyguesTelecom (3G-less operator)

@Charles: Ten Mobile has no unlimited Data, it offers you only 1Megabyte of real data per month. Though it has unlimited websurfing through OperaMini and MSN through a java Applet... they can count every single byte used. MVNO will never beat the operator on which they rely, how could they ? that's whythey sell specially tailored products: Unlimited SMSs, Unlimited calls to 2 Friends, Unlimited Wap, but never all at a time...

Let's face it. French operators will never try to compete, they paid fines because of staying intentionnaly aligned (high).

Unless an operator like Iliad/Free tries "throwing a stone in the pod" (as we say here) like they did with unbundled ADSL by biding on the 4th 3G licence, all we could do is pay pay pay pay pay... !

Well here's an interesting bit of information. In Italy it's actually against the law to sell a mobile phone locked to a carrier. Even carrier branded handsets come unlocked right out of the box. I'd expect the Italy announcement (and subsequent availability) to come dead last from all the other major nations.

I use orange business and it is fine. Basically, it is the comparable to Cingular in the states. France Telecom being the previous monopoly equivalent of SBC/AT&T.

Orange is the historical French telecom provider and is fighting against SFR and Bouygues.

But from what I've heard here in France there is a rumor about the fact that Orange won't be providing a data plan with the iPhone, though I don't believe it, it's still a persistent rumor...

I'm using mine with an Orange MVNO called Ten-mobile.com which provide unlimited data plan for a few euros and it rocks big time.

Orange is probably the best operator in France though not the cheapest. Another drawback is that they tend to focus data plans only to professionals. But french site macbidouille has reported that some orange subscribers got a survey today - how they'd feel about some plan with unlimited mail and browsing + 200 SMS...
That'd be smart.

Like others have said, Orange is a good deal in terms on technical details. Great coverage, EDGE is ubiquitous and their network works well. And usually even if they're not the cheapest, their plan includes convenient services built-in, so if what's in the plan matters to you (like mobile email, caller-id for instance), it's cheaper than the others. But no unlimited data? Please! But I guess we'll know for sure later and I hope the rumor is wrong. I also wish we wont have to wait later than Nov. 9th. Hopefully I was in NYC last week and I got an iPod touch there, that'll keep me busy until the beast is released...