New Delhi, May 6: Vodafone, on Tuesday, said that it had inked a deal with Apple to become the first telecom operator to officially launch the iPhone in the Indian market along with nine other countries. “Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, India, Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network,” said the UK-based telecom giant in a release.

Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone company by revenue, had lost out on exclusive deals with Apple last year in both the UK and German markets, where the contracts were won by O2 and T-Mobile networks, respectively. With the announcement of the above mentioned deal with Vodafone, Apple has recorded a marked shift in strategy of selling its device through a single operator in every country as two telecoms companies, Vodafone and Telecom Italia will now have the licence to sell iPhone in Italy. According to the buzz, Australia may also see two to three players selling the device.

Currently the Apple iPhone is available in the US, France, Ireland, Austria, Germany and UK. US has the highest number of iPhone subscribers in the world, followed by China and Russia - despite the fact that Apple doesn’t have deals with local operators in both these countries. Till now, iPhone was distributed by AT&T in United States, Telefonica's O2 in Britain and Deutsche Telekom in Germany etc. According to telecom analysts, as the device begins to be sold by multiple operators, consumers will be the main beneficiaries. Till now the preferred way to grab an iPhone in India was to get someone to bring it from USA . But such phones had to be unlocked by select softwares available online. Unlocking the Apple iPhone without losing call quality has been a matter of hot debate since the time of its global launch.