T-Mobile UK Dismisses iPhone 3G Rumours As Speculation

T-Mobile UK has been forced into admitting that it doesn't have plans to sell the iPhone 3G in the UK anytime soon and said that talks about the deal were "merely speculation".

The rebuttal comes a few days after tech website the Register said that O2's exclusive partnership with Apple would come to an end soon. T-Mobile reportedly told the publication that it was in talks with Apple about selling the iPhone 3G in the next few months.

But the following day, a T-Mobile spokesperson told the Washington Post that although the company won't comment or deny the story, the report published by the Register was purely speculative.

O2's agreement is supposed to last till 2011 but Apple might be tempted to free the iPhone from the shackles of being on one network only. As mentioned before, the iPhone is now popular enough for it to fly by its own.

We have said in the past that there were signs that O2 was going to lose the iPhone exclusivity. One rather obvious sign was the fact that the Telefonica-owned company has been busy trying to get capture smartphones with similar capabilities as the iPhone.

The Palm Pre is one of them and the company also managed to get the i7500 as well as the Toshiba TG01 1GHz smartphone, both of them touchscreen devices based on Android.

T-Mobile is currently fourth in the UK in terms of the number of customers and it might be argued that it wouldn't make sense for Apple to break the bond with O2, the biggest UK network for a smaller network.

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