Above posted screen was posted on Ufone’s website last night, hinting that Ufone could be the first cellular carrier in the country to officially bring iPhone devices in Pakistan.
While we don’t have any confirmation or any official word from Ufone, the above posted picture can easily be interpreted that operator is planning to bring iPhone devices in Pakistan, a market with over 15 million smartphone users.
“Ufone network is now iPhone ready” can be termed as a vague statement and must not be treated as a conclusive or meaningful phrase, but it be translated that Ufone and Apple collaborated (officially) for something. It can be network tweaking, software upgrade, bug-fixing, network optimisation with respect to iPhone devices or anything else.
Yes, it can also be an agreement for allowing Ufone to officially retail iPhone devices in Pakistan.
On a related note, we know that some operators had to configure their network (software and hardware) to support iPhone’s Face Time when Californian smartphone maker enabled the support for Face-Time calls over cellular networks rather than solely over Wi-Fi.
This happened two years ago in rest of the world but since 3G was made available in Pakistan only recently (Face Time Calls would naturally not work on GPRS/EDGE), there is a chance that this “Ufone Network is Ready for iPhone” may only mean that Ufone’s network now seamlessly support Face Time calls.
Not to forget, Ufone and Telenor recently asked its iPhone customers to update their OS through an OTA update that they were to receive from Apple. Reportedly, both operators had asked Apple to send an OS update to users in Pakistan that included a bug-fix.
It merits mentioning here that a tipster had confirmed me back in May 2014 – at the time of 3G auction – that Apple has plans to bring its iPhone devices in Pakistan. He had further told me that there could be two operators to officially bring iPhone in the country somewhere around September 2014. Due to lack of authoritative confirmations we didn’t carry the story then but we just hope now that this teaser from Ufone is about iPhone’s official launch in Pakistan.
In other news, Apple is rumoured to launch next versions of iPhone on September 30th, 2014. Apple may launch two devices namely iPhone 6 and iPhone Air with different screen sizes, later to fall in phablet category.
