Orange tickled pink by first-day iPhone sales

The Gadget Show  Wednesday 11 November 2009

Orange says 30,000 people signed up for the iPhone yesterday

Orange shifted 30,000 iPhones within hours of becoming the first network outside of O2 to offer Apple’s iconic handset.

After two years watching from the sidelines thanks to O2’s two-year exclusivity deal with Apple, Orange was keen to make up for lost time and by 4pm yesterday claimed to have broken the UK’s first-day sales record for a new handset.

So far Orange is the only other network besides O2 to start carrying the iPhone, with Vodafone set to join the fray in a couple of months. Vodafone has also thrown down the gauntlet by recently claiming that it had the fastest video download speed for the iPhone.

Orange is hoping to lure customers with the promise of better network coverage than O2. And it seems happy to go toe-to-toe on price, with its contract offerings all but identical to O2’s, although it does limit its users to 750MB of data use per month, unlike O2.

Orange is selling the iPhone in its own shops, along with independent retailers Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U.