I’m sure you’ve gone “oohh” and “ahhh” over the Apple iPhone.

For some (and for me), it’s the perfect mobile phone – Ever. Period. Now, are you wondering when is the release date for iPhone in the Philippines? Sorry but it’s not this year.

Unfortunately, AT&T has a deal with Apple for an apperent lock-down on exclusive rights as telco in the United States. The iphone was released in the US last June 29 in what Steve Jobs and company dubbed, the most succesful product intro of the 21st century.

With record-breaking sales, Apple now anticipate 13.5 million iPhone sales by the end of 2008, with Apple planning to produce 8 million of the devices by the end of 2007 – well ahead of Steve Jobs’ target of ten million sales by the end of 2008.

But when can WE Pinoys get our hands on it? That, after the jump…

Let’s take reliable news from CNET. They report an Asia release for the iPhone in 2008. I hope that includes us, the Philippines.

According to CNET News.com’s Tom Krazit, the main reason the Cupertino company’s latest version of Mac OS X is scheduled for a later release in October was because it had to pull engineers from the Leopard development and have them work on the iPhone instead. In a statement on the Apple Web site, the “iPhone contains the most sophiscated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price–we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team”.

Now the question is: how much, Steve?

In the US the unit will net you around $500 to $600 USD (that’s around P25,000.00 to P30,000.00) for the unit ALONE. But guess what? You can’t buy the iPhone alone. You’ll have to get an AT&T contract! Add all the legal mumbo-jumbo and you’ll probably spending something to the tune of $3,000 USD! Geezzuz! That’s around P150,000 for us here.

I’m sure Apple will only talk to the major telco providers in Asia. Let’s just hope that Smart, et al are doing their thing.

Great phone? Yes. Worth it? I’ll leave that up to you.