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iPhone exclusivity officially came to an end in the U.K. yesterday when, joining O2, Orange became the second carrier to offer the Apple smart phone in the country. And judging by Orange’s first-day sales, the debut was quite a success. The iPhone went on sale at 7 am Tuesday and by 4 pm, Orange had sold more than 30,000.

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With Palm’s shares up more than 900 percent since January, they were destined to suffer a correction someday. And now it seems that day has finally come. Shares in the handset maker fell some 23 percent last week amid concerns about increased competition from Google’s Android operating system, which is being rolled out on a number of devices at a variety of carriers, including Palm partner Sprint.

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Well this certainly doesn’t bode well for O2: The U.K. wireless carrier, which has reportedly been selling about 2,200 iPhones a day since it secured exclusive distribution rights to the device in 2007, has run out of the 3GS model. Extremely high levels of demand have emptied not just the company’s physical retail outlets, but its online store as well.

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iPhone exclusivity is rapidly coming to an end. Less than 24 hours after Orange UK announced plans to offer Apple’s iconic handset to its customers “later this year,” Vodafone said that it plans to do so as well.

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Now that sales of the Pre in the states have tapered off to a point where supply and demand are roughly in parity, Palm is gearing up to bring the handset to Europe. In a statement issued this morning, the company said Telefónica’s O2 subsidiary will carry the Pre in the U.K., Germany and Ireland, while its Movistar brand will offer it in Spain.

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Palm says it hasn’t yet announced a Pre distribution deal with Telefónica.
No matter–it appears as though the Spanish media have taken the liberty of doing it for the company. According to a number of Spanish news outlets, the carrier has negotiated an exclusive deal with Palm to distribute the new handset in Spain and Latin America, and perhaps England as well.

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The best laid plans of mice and men “gang aft agley,” as they say. iPhone carriers as well, apparently. Because British wireless carrier O2 claims it was well prepared for the iPhone pre-order event that felled its Web site earlier this week. It just wasn’t well prepared enough. In an email to customers today, O2 apologized for the failure of its online ordering system this week, explaining there was little it could do to prepare for the 13,000 orders per second that overwhelmed it. That’s right: 13,000 orders per second. O2’s full statement follows.

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If you’re going to offer a device as eagerly anticipated as the iPhone 3G for pre-order online (and with courier delivery to boot), you might want to prepare for it with some server redundancy and fault-tolerance checks. Otherwise, you might find yourself in a situation akin to the one in which O2 found itself today.

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Apple is expanding its iPhone empire with near Alexandrian initiative. Today, the company struck an extensive deal with France Telecom’s Orange wireless carrier to distribute the device in more than 10 markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.

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Only Apple would launch a 2.5G device in a country where 20% of mobile-phone users own 3G-enabled handsets and expect them to downgrade their wireless experience and pay a premium for doing so.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed yesterday that the company’s iPhone will go on sale in Britain Nov. 9 and be carried exclusively by [...]

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Note: John Paczkowski is on vacation and won’t be writing or posting videos until he returns Monday.

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. We’re calling it the Tech 10 and it appears below.

1. As inevitable as death and taxes: YouTube, the world’s No. 1 video site, will begin placing ads in its videos, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher reports. The animated advertising will appear no earlier than 15 seconds into a video, overlaid on the bottom fifth of the screen. Citing viewer revulsion, a YouTube product manager told NewTeeVee the site will not use the dreaded preroll or postroll.

2. Apple, leveraging its deal-brokering with AT&T stateside, has signed up European partners for iPhone sales and service. A report in the Financial Times notes that three telecoms–T-Mobile in Germany, Orange in France and O2 in the United Kingdom–will fork over 10% of the revenues made from iPhone calls and data transfers.

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The battle for rights to bring the iPhone across the Atlantic appears to be winding down. According to current speculation, France Telecom’s Orange, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and Telefónica’s O2 will be given the privilege of distributing the device in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, respectively–though O2 denies it’s sealed the deal.
Apple had initially planned [...]

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