Why is the iphone difficult to buy

...my point being that here in the UK its only available on O2, which i think is a similar case everywhere its released (not o2 but only one or two mobile providers), apple cheesed me off with this so bad!

Surely if they released it on every network they'd sell more and us as the consumer would get a better deal because the tariffs would be better because of the competition.

I was in contact when the first version was released and it was too expensive to get out of. Then the 3G came out and as much as i want one i was still on orange and its still a pain to get out of and they knocked 75% of my line rental when i said i wanted to change and get an iphone so i went with orange again - i was with o2 a few years ago and i really dont wanna go back with them unless i have too!

Anyway i figure from all the new rumors its hopefully out here in June, so im out of my contract and im waiting like mad for more news.

Heres hoping it doesnt have a horrid slide out keypad thing - i'm hoping for a nano version though how cool would that be, and im hoping it has an amazing camera not a 3.2megapixel i keep hearing about!

2mp actually...sorry

Apple has done "exclusive" deal everywhere in the world (France being the only real exception and only because they lost a law suit). I don't expect this to change, at least not in the US.

Part of the issue, at east here in the US, is the competing cell technologies. AT&T, Sprint and Verizon (the big 3) all use different and incompatible cell technologies. Apple went with the world wide standard (GSM) on AT&T but the initially wanted to go with CDMS (Verizon). The cost for manufacturing phones to work with different technologies probably would not be that much but customers would complain that they couldn't take their precious iPhones from company A to company B because of this. In the end, the exclusive deals give Apple far more control of the product and how it is sold/managed than any other cell maker has ever had.

Odds are, if you want an iPhone, your going to have to stay with whoever sells them, or at least another GSM based providers (here in the US T-Mobile is also GSM) and take what you can get.