iPhone in over 10 countries

Orange today announced that "later this year" they will make the Apple iPhone available in more than ten countries including Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Orange's African markets.

Orange seem to save their words even better than Vodafone. Recently Vodafone announced the future iPhone availability in ten countries in only two sentences.

The Orange PR team obviously outdoes them since today they managed to stuff more than ten countries on their future availability list in only ONE sentence. Well, that's an achievement that should be worth the four years spent at the PR school.



Summing it up, it seems the highly rumored 3G iPhone will have almost entire world covered. But did you notice that Spain is still not on the list. We bet O2 is going to snatch that deal along with several other countries.

Confirmed expected iPhone coverage (besides USA and Canada):
Europe:

Austria - Orange, T-Mobile
Belgium - Orange
Czech Republic - Vodafone
France - Orange (already available)
Germany - T-Mobile (already available)
Greece - Vodafone
Ireland - O2 (already available)
Italy - Vodafone, Telecom Italia
Poland - Orange
Portugal - Orange, Vodafone
Romania - Orange
Slovakia - Orange
Switzerland - Orange, Swisscom
Turkey - Vodafone
UK - O2 (already available)
Other countries and regions:

Africa - Orange, Vodafone
Australia - Vodafone, SingTel (Optus)
Dominican Republic - Orange
India - Vodafone
Jordan - Orange
Latin America - America Movil (Claro)
New Zealand - Vodafone
Some carriers obviously overlap, so this year might just bring the end of the exclusivity battle for the iPhone and carriers will share the iPhone market. And usually good competiton means better price tags.

Opera Mobile 9.5 to compete with iPhone's Safari browser?

We've spotted a live video preview of the latest Opera Mobile 9.5 - a fast and feature-rich web browser for mobile devices that strives to snatch the iPhone's Safari browser title for best mobile browsing experience (for the record, we've just made up this title, ok?).



You can watch the live preview by Matthew Miller from ZDNet and judge for yourselves but it's worth pointing some of the highlights.

Opera seem to have done some great work on their Presto rendering engine - the web browser is fast and it offers pretty much the same fluid-like panning and scrolling as Apple iPhone. But you've got to remember that this demo is running on the HTC Advantage which not only packs a VGA resolution display but also has a fast 624MHz CPU and a dedicated ATi graphics chip.



Now as far as navigation is concerned you will notice the "double-tap-to-zoom-in-a-paragraph" trick that is also used by the iPhone's Safari web browser. But you might also notice that the use of the Opera Mobile 9.5 relies heavily on the use of a stylus, a tool that the GSMarena team is not really fond of.

Yet the Opera Mobile 9.5 offers so much more than the iPhone Safari - automatic fullscreen mode, copy and paste, sending hyperlinks to other people, saving images and downloading files. It can even store pages for offline viewing.



Overall the new Opera Mobile 9.5 sounds like a killer deal for Windows Mobile users who have been plagued by the inadequate Explorer Mobile browser way too long. We are so looking forward to getting our hands on that browser and testing it for ourselves.

By the way, in case you are interested, you can also check out the official Opera Mobile 9.5 walkthrough created by the Opera team themselves. It's funny how their presentation setup and even studio lighting resembles the Apple iPhone demos. Enjoy!