Apple's (AAPL) Sept. 18 announcement: iPhone in Europe?

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has begun to round up the press for a big news conference next Tuesday. The event will be in London and will probably cover Apple's plans for its iPhone in the UK, France, and Germany.

Apple's PR machine does not know how to do anything small, so it is expected that the company will say that it will "hand a UK sale deal to Spanish Telefonica's O2 UK unit, a German deal to Deutsche Telekom's (NYSE:DT) T-Mobile and a French deal to France Telecom's (NYSE: FTE) Orange."

With the iPhone's price already dropped, sales in Europe can be expected to be strong.

The product, however, has at least two problems as it moves overseas. One is that the phone is currently a 2.5G product while Europe cellular users are, in many cases, already on 3G networks. Apple would need a short time table to get a next-generation product to market.

The other issue with the iPhone is that technology pirates have figured out how to "unlock" the device so that it can work on more than one cellular network. It is too early to say whether this will affect the exclusivity that Apple is seeking from network partners, but it at least raises the question of how easy it will be to force consumers to stay with one provider.

Now it's on to Asia.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.