iPhone in México, confirmed!

After almost 8 months of rumors about iPhone coming in Latin America, it's confirmed. America Movil, méxico-based company that is operating in 16 countries will have that pleasure.

But who knows if Movistar (Spanish operator who also have part of market share in some of that countries) will fight for part of a ‘pie’.

After opening a Apple store in November, it was only question of time when and what company will bring it over… In this moment they are not saying when exactly iPhone will be published, but the company report says this year. Apple’s first idea was exclusive contracts with mobile companies, but few days ago, Vodafone and Telecom Italia announced that will have right to sell, and they are not applying for exclusive contract with Apple. Good move Apple! Exclusive contracts sucks.

About iPhone

There is probably no person that didn’t hear for Apple’s iPhone. I can say that is most popular cell phone at this moment and almost every major cell phone company as Samsung, Motorola, LG or Nokia is copying the look and the way how is working. It’s nothing new for Apple.

It's a combination of cell phone, iPod player, internet gadget with gorgeous screen. There is new version of iPhone in production, version 2.0 that has few updates, but, like nothing is confirmed, we can only wait. The rumours says that will have new case, 3G support, gps support, better battery life, and of course, some software updates.

Some of the rumoured photos:

America Movil (Telcel)

AM is major cell phone operator in México, with Carlos Slim at the top. The other parts of Mexican cell phone pie, are Movistar, Nextel and Iusacell. In my opinion, Telcel service is bad and expensive. Statistics says that is one of the most expensive mobile services in the world. When you try some of the European mobile service (service, not price) like Vodafone or T-Mobile, you can see that Telcel is few steps behind. Some of the things that I noticed:

• There is no SMS confirmation. (How can you know if someone received your message? You can't!)
• To receive international call, or call from another Mexican state, you, as call receiver are also paying (!!!), if you don’t have credit, you can’t receive a call!
• Costumer service (CS) is around 10% efficient, but hey, that is not so bad right? Every time when you make a call to CS, you can hear horrible noise, it’s very difficult to understand the technical person
• If you still have some credit on your account, let’s say 50 pesos (US 5$) they are sending screen notice that you need to buy credit, to keep talking and sending sms messages, but you still can because you have credit. Can we call it SPAM?
• Internet service like EDGE, 3G (3G came one few weeks ago) are available only at rent.
• No mail-to-sms service (prepaid), but at the end who is using that right?

• You can pass or receive credit from someone else, great feature, and not so expensive (around US 0.28$)
• Looking the size of México, very good signal coverage.

Resources: Reuters, America Movil, Macworld.