The most eagerly awaited gadget of the year, Apple's iPhone, goes on sale in Britain and Germany this week to test European appetite for the mobile phone that thousands queued for in the U.S. in June.

Consumer electronics company Apple, mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and mobile operator O2 will open stores around 1800 GMT on Friday in Britain for just four hours for a hoped-for stampede for the touch-screen phone.

In Germany it will be sold by Deutsche Telekom's mobile phone division T-Mobile. It will go on sale in one Telekom shop in Cologne just after midnight on Friday morning and will then roll out across the country.

Hundreds of extra staff have been taken on, and companies are hoping Apple's combined iPod music player, Web browser and camera will catch the public imagination in time for Christmas.

Apple has confirmed that the UK launch time of its iPhone will be 6.02pm on Friday November 9. The £269 gadget will go on sale at around 1,300 Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores across the UK and via their websites. Purchases will be capped at two iPhones per person on a first come, first served basis. Queues are expected to start forming outside shops well ahead of the evening launch....

Not content with redefining the mobile phone and computer industries, the iPhone can now take credit for creating new jobs and saving the UK economy, apparently.

The news comes from O2, which is recruiting more than 1,400 new bods to help punters understand just how radically cool their new phone is, once it's launched on Friday.

The iPhone will hit Europe this week, and at prices that are likely to put pressure on Rogers Communications Inc. to cut its cellphone rates if it wants to be the carrier that eventually brings the popular device to Canada

European carriers will offer service plans that start at the equivalent of $70 a month. A rough calculation based on Rogers' current fees for its existing cellphone services indicates that similar features are more than double the price here, based on the cheapest plan. With some other data plans for Rogers' cellphones, customers could rack up bills of hundreds, or conceivably thousands, of dollars.

The data price gap could set the stage for intense negotiations between Toronto-based Rogers and Apple Inc., which designed and markets the popular multimedia phone. Apple was able to wring substantial changes from carriers in the United States and Europe....

So far, Rogers has had little to say about pricing. On timing, it says the launch plan is in Apple's hands.

Buyers unable to wait until Friday are looking to hundreds of eBay auctions to get their hands on Apple's latest Newton-a-like - but many of the auctions are fakes and scams, prompting eBay to tighten its restrictions on sales of the much-desired handset....

A brief search revealed one seller offering an iPhone as brand new, sealed in its box, and unlocked - a feat necessitating some form of reverse-Houdinism, as reprogramming the handset would usually require, er, gaining access to the contents of the box. We tried to confirm what kind of brilliant escapist trickery was used, but were unable to contact the seller.

Research from NetNames found that 70 per cent of the auctions were offering unlocked handsets, and 62 per cent of them claimed to have stock already in the UK, though many were selling the Chinese knockoff known as the CECT iphone.

Apple's rise from the ashes is largely down to the success of the iPod. But how does the new iPhone fare as a media player? Find out in the third part of our extended iPhone review.Read the rest of the review here

The piece of the iPhone puzzle which will be most familiar to many potential buyers is the one which has helped turn Apple from a computer brand to a consumer electronics company: the iPod.

So my colleague Arik Hesseldahl won't buy an iPhone. And I really didn't mean to. But Apple got me. Quite despite my better judgment (while Arik's cross about third party software, I'm much crosser about Apple's apparent disdain for the fans who've patiently supported them for years.)

Anyhow. Turns out that I'm a sucker for whizbang devices after all. And given that my contract (with Sprint) was up, and my existing phone not only resembled some kind of large electric shaver from the 1970s but was dusty pink (note to manufacturers: dusty pink is a dreadful colorway) I decided to go for broke.

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