Vodafone, which didn’t participate in the launch of the iPhone in its home country, England, has now partnered with Apple to launch the iPhone in 10 different countries. Later this year, customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone from Vodafone. In a short message on its website.

Vodafone announced the launch, avoiding any reference to which model (2.5G via EDGE or the rumored 3G via UMTS) will be offered.

In addition Telecom Italia Mobile confirmed the news story from last week, that they will be selling the iPhone in Italy soon. Which will make Italy the first country where customers can get the iPhone from two different providers. This can be seen as a
confirmation that Apple is slowly but surely moving away from the “you can be our exclusive partner, dear telco, but you have to agree to fork over a share of the usage revenue” model and is really going for overall smart phone market share, leaving some of that nice recurring revenue stream on the table.

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A UMTS iPhone might come to Italy soon. At least according to the Monday edition of the Italian newspaper “La Repubblica”.

No concrete release date was given by the newspaper’s sources inside Telecom Italia Mobile, just that it’s coming in the next several weeks and that it will be a UMTS version.

And in a sign that Apple’s sales strategy is changing rapidly, Telecom Italia Mobile is no longer bound by a multi-year exclusive deal with an ongoing revenue share for voice and data usage. Apple will just get a cut from the initial (slightly higher) sales price. In return Telecom Italia Mobile gets a six month head start in Italy but then the iPhone will be sold through other providers.

Looks like Apple is adjusting after the somewhat disappointing sales of the iPhone in the UK, France and Germany and trying to find other sales strategies to still reach the goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008.

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