Orange reports it has sold 80,000 SPV smart phones, of which 35,000 were sold in France. This reports Neteconomie.com. Although this number is relatively low, compared for example to 200,000 i-mode phones sold by Bouygues Telecom, Orange underlines that the SPV initially was aimed at corporate users and for this market the number is not that bad. The phone initially was sold with subscription for EUR 249, but later the price dropped to EUR 99, which is a normal depreciation after 6 months of introduction of any mobile phone phone nowadays. Users of Orange SPV phones also use in average 5 MB GPRS traffic monthly, compared to just 500 KB among regular WAP users. Orange intends to launch other smartphones, based on PalmOS or SymbianOS, to push the multi-media mobile phone market and to catch up with Vodafone which already crossed the line of the 1,500,000 subscribers with Vodafone Live! in Europe.
