A lot going on in the mobile industry in the last few days and Israel is in the hot spot (no pun intended). Let’s start with the fact that all 3 cellular providers; Orange, Cellcom, and Pelephone recently announced that they will be launching the iPhone 3Gs over the next few months. The word on the street, and when I say street, I mean Twittersphere of course, is that at least two of the three providers bought 100 thousand iPhones from Apple. Now you have to understand that fact in the context that these providers max out at 150 thousand mobile devices sold annually! So out of the 150 thousand phones they will sell in 2009, 100 thousand will be iPhones?!
Orange
The Victory of Social Media over Cellular Providers
So to continue from where we left off, I had told Orange that I appreciated their offer of a free Blackberry Bold, but I was not willing to commit to a year and a half of Blackberry service since I know I will probably be switching phones within the next year and a half and Blackberry service is useless if I have an iPhone.
Cellular Providers and Social Media
I am happy to report that after putting social media to the ultimate test, it passed, but unfortunately Cellcom did not. OK, here is the story. After writing that last blog post about how horrific Cellcom’s service has been, and after attempting to speak to a manager for months, I finally got the call. It did not take long, in fact it was around a half an hour after the post was published that I got a call from a senior manager in Cellcom apologizing for the whole ordeal and offering me a “new” phone for “free”.
Orange Finally Realizing the Potential of Social Media
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a blogger’s event hosted by Orange the other day. They invited a group of bloggers and twitters (their definition, not mine) to hear about the way Orange operates, in terms of choosing phones, marketing them, testing them, and selling them. It was a very interesting crowd, mostly people I communicate with on Twitter and have met at a few events before. When we arrived, we were greeted by the top executives of Orange, which at least for me, showed that they meant business.