Vodafone UK has made some interesting decisions recently and together they make for a curious story. Firstly the HTC HD2 was dropped for everyone except enterprise customers and then followed news that the Xperia X2 is now unlikely to see the light of day on the network despite the fact that it had been touted on the official Vodafone site until very recently.
Now, there has also been a small rumble about Vodafone dropping the BlackBerry Storm 2 on its eForum and a moderator came back with a denial. I am waiting to see how the future of this phone turns out on Vodafone because I had heard that it was dropped from a different source, yet I can’t see a network who does ‘very’ well out of RIM doing this. Next, Vodafone has just been announced as the UK supplier of the Google Nexus One (another HTC phone) so it turns out that there has not been a falling out there after all. With the iPhone coming to Vodafone on the 14th (too late?) the Nexus looks like a good move to me and I would expect it to sell well, but does this signal a move away from Windows Mobile by Vodafone or even HTC? Vodafones 360 platform would also be under threat from the new ‘super phone’, as Google likes to call it, which makes the situation even harder to get to grips with.
This is a tale of too many platforms, too many manufacturers and a network operator struggling to cope with too many choices for too many consumers. Not a nice place to be and all network operators have to battle with this.
