The Washington Post is reporting that TMobile will carry the iPhone in Germany on November 1st. This is big news for a couple of reasons.
It means that Apple is probably going with the “National Carriers” AT&T in the US (used to be a monopoly), Tmobile is Deutsche Telekom – the former government telecom. So from this we can likely assume that Vodafone (or more likely O2) in the UK and Orange in France will also be exclusive iPhone carriers
The European release will be a 3G iPhone. Why? There is no EDGE in Europe. Apple can’t release a slower phone in Europe that only does GPRS than the current model. This also means that Apple will probably release a 3G iPhone in the US rather than have a “better” version floating around Europe. By then, the iPhone could also include GPS, better camera(s) and other hardware goodies. The iPhone software suite will probably be rounded out at that point with iChat client (VOIP?), VLC client, simple image editing, etc. This will be the true iPhone 1.0. Though the current version isn’t so bad.