T-Mobile Germany is being ordered to drop two-year contracts and to sell unlocked iPhones thanks to Verizon Wireless' partner Vodafone and the German court system. Sounds like another "does not play well with others" scenario reminiscent of Microsoft pulling Internet Explorer support when Apple introduced Safari. Vodafone lost the three recent European countries by not wanting to revenue share on contracts so now Telefonica (O2) has the UK, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) Germany and France Telecom (Orange) in France.

Current reports from Germany (Reuters Frankfurt) are indicating that you can now get an unlocked iPhone from T-Mobile for €999 ($1478.00), a €600 increase from a contracted T-Mobile iPhone (See earlier article). If you were to continue the T-Mobile contract, the total contract would cost the user €1,176 minimum plus the €399 to purchase the iPhone. Now the end users will have to find a plan for less than €24/month and they still will give up the visual voice mail and EDGE connectivity for web browsing.

If this is allowed to continue in Germany, Vodafone will likely take their tactics to France and the UK. France already has laws that prevent the selling of locked phones, so next week's intro will tell the story. This writer doesn't know what Vodafone wants, considering they were offered the right of refusal (which they most certainly did).

Other rumors from (Morse and mela blog.it) filtering out of Europe are that Vodafone is going to be the 3G UMTS provider for all of Europe starting with Italy in early 2008 (maybe to be announced at Macworld SF). According to the Spanish technology site El Pais, Spain expects to see the iPhone in May 2008.

In other parts of the world, iPhones are showing up in crates. It appears that China is the outlet for all those unaccounted-for 250,000 iPhones, that is phones not being registered on an authorized network. According to a report at Blackfriar's Marketing China's black market is ripe with iPhones.

The iPhone is readily available in computer superstores in most large Chinese cities. In Beijing's Zhong Guancun, a 15-story mall filled with technology vendors, almost all the stalls are stocked. Two weeks ago, the blogger of Too Many Resources for the iPhone asked several of these vendors whether they could sell him 100 iPhones. They all answered "No problem."

Let us know what you think over in the comments and forums.