Russia Gets iPhone 3GRussia Gets iPhone 3G

Russian wireless customers will soon be able to officially get their hands on the iPhone 3G, as two mobile operators have recently reached an agreement with Apple.

Russia's third-largest carrier, MegaFon, announced Tuesday it would sell the handset later this year. This comes days after another carrier, Vimpelcom, said it had also reached an agreement to sell the iPhone 3G.

No details of the agreement have been released or how much the handset will cost, and industry analysts say the country's largest cell phone service provider, Mobile Telesystems, will soon be added to the list of carriers offering the iPhone 3G.

Although it has not been officially available, the iPhone has been extremely popular in Russia. Analysts estimate that there are at least 500,000 units of the first-generation units in Russia, with about 20,000 iPhone 3Gs sold each month.

Users often pay up to $1,000 for the handset on the black market, and then another $100 to unlock it and run it on a Russian carrier. The official version should be considerably less with a carrier subsidy, but some users may balk at being tied to one carrier.

"Typically Russian operators are not strong handset sellers, and users prefer to buy handsets separately from their mobile contracts," Konstantin Belov, telecom analyst at UralSib, told the Associated Press. "But the iPhone is very popular, and if mobile operators start subsidizing it, they will probably see strong demand."

The move is Apple's latest to expand the iPhone's global reach. The original iPhone has already sold more than 6 million units while only being available in six countries. The iPhone 3G launched in 22 countries, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs said it would eventually be sold in 70 countries.