Etisalat to Launch iPhone 3GS Before the End of the Month in UAE; Plans its Own Branded Phones.

Updated.

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Mohammad Al Zaki, Marketing Director of Etisalat, told the Emarati newspaper Emarrat Alyoum, that Etisalat, the largest triple play operator in United Arab Emirates (UAE) will launch iPhone 3GS before the end of this month and that the company is planning to launch its own branded mobile phones by the end of the year. (More details about this will be on ArabCrunch soon inshallah.)

The launch of iPhone 3GS by Eitisalat would concede with the same launch date Etisalat has announced for HTC Magic, a Google’s Android powered touch phone in the UAE.� HTC Magic comes equipped with a 3.2-inch HVGA touch screen display, a trackball and optimized navigational buttons, a 3.2 mega-pixel camera and GPS.

On the other hand, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) has started taking pre-booking orders for its upcoming HTC magic. STC will sell HTC Magic for 2,399 SR ($ 631 USD) and includes a free subscription to a 12-month data plan with a limit of 1 Gigabyte each. While Etisalat plans to sell the device at AED 2199 ($ 598.72 USD) for prepaid customers with one month free 5GB data package. ArabCrunch could not obtain Etisalat’s iPhone 3GS price and data plan.

With this announcement UAE will be the second country in the Arab world to get iPhone 3GS after Egypt .

In Jordan unverified sources told ArabCrunch that Orange will not launch iPhone 3GS until its current inventory of iPhone 3G is sold. These sources added that Orange had a very poor sales for its iPhone 3G models at selling only 4,000 unites since the device launch in Jordan!

Update: Majd Shweikeh CEO of Orange Mobile  tweeted me with “the info is not true, but i can’t give details due to confidentiality on the matter.”

Though, other sources said that it is Apple who is slow about introducing iPhone 3GS in Jordan as Apple has a reputation of neglecting the Arab world.

iPhone 3Gs , has great upgraded features to Apple’s former iPhone 3G, such as faster speed, video with 3 megapixel camera, cute, copy and paste and compass.

Like iPhone, HTC Magic uses TFT capacitive touchscreen which are considered more durable and responsive than the resistive touch screens. The former is being used by most other mobile vendors.

Unlike resistive touch screens, capacitive touch screens work by sensing the electrical properties of the human body instead of pressure.

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