A while ago, I wrote that iPhone won’t matter in Europe. Now that iPhone has been announced to the three major markets in Europe, without 3G as some were hoping, let’s see what has changed since my original post.

For those who were expecting 3G. What were you expecting? You saw the backslash Apple’s price-cut caused. Can you imagine what would’ve happened if Apple announced a 3G model (with larger capacity) first in Europe, which isn’t even their main market? Now, many people will criticize iPhone for entering Europe without featuring 3G, but these aren’t the people who’re going to buy one. I really don’t believe that 3G is the deal-breaker for anyone who’s really planning to get one. Given that other manufacturer’s can put out phones with 3G and decent battery life, I have hard time believing that to be the top reason why iPhone doesn’t have it as Steve Jobs claims. Then again, telling Europeans that Apple cares more about their US market would not be a good idea.

Do Europeans even care about iPhone? Here’s a nice graph that illustrates one of my points. Symbian, for those who don’t care about smartphones, is the OS which among others, powers all Nokia’s smartphones and not-so-smartphones. The market is different, even though iPhone is not probably aimed at the same market as other smartphones, which is good to keep in mind. I still don’t expect to see major differences in that graph in the future.

Exclusivity to operators means that iPhone will still be a novelty in Europe, especially now that iPod Touch has been released. Even though both Apple and Nokia try to convince us that one device that does it all is the way forward, I will throw out a prediction that iPod Touch plus one’s current cell phone will be a serious alternative to anyone wanting the iPhone experience. Does it make any sense? Let’s see what happens.

In the comments of my original post, I mentioned how Nokia’s original Nokia Club was shot down in flames by the mobile operators. iPhone, of course, does the same through its WLAN iTunes store and Ringtones-thing. Nokia, on the other, hand also believes the time is right for another try and launched Ovi. Conincidentally, UK operator Orange has no Nokia phones in their Christmas line-up. Let’s see how this works out this time. I have no idea how important content services like ringtones are for operators’ bottom lines, but Orange’s apparent retaliation would indicate that it means something.

Another thing, I got my hands on a Nokia E70 and while I got totally frustrated with the complex UI. For example, there are at least three different context menus for any given contact, all with a long list of different commands,  depending how deep in the menu tree you’re in the address book. Other than that, I’ve was blown away by the ecosystem of applications available for the phone. Nokia Maps is neat and there’s even putty for the people in need of a SSH client. The internal browser really gives a “true web” experience, but lack of memory cause heavy sites like flickr.com’s and google maps’s non-mobile sites to choke the phone. It’s a solid phone, even though the UI gave me a headache.

For a 1.0 product, iPhone really shows to other manufacturers what’s possible, but I’m still not convinced that it will cause any revolutions. Apple sent a press release that they’ve achieved their 1 million sold by end of September target for iPhone. Apple doesn’t usually tell exact market figures for their products and I’m guessing that unless iPhone does insanely well in Europe we’re not going to hear numbers for Europe, just aggregate numbers when total sales crosses other significant milestones.

My last prediction is that rest of Europe will see iPhone in the same way that iTunes store spread. First the the big three, then others that share common market elemens (iTunes: Euro, iPhone: carrier) and then finally the rest. Given that Finland belongs to the “rest”-category, I’m not expecting iPhone to hit stores here anytime soon.

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