Italian 3G iPhone confirmed

Over at David Manners' blog, there's confirmation — if it were really needed — that the 3G iPhone is launching next month, in Italy at least.

Manners is one of the world's most venerable tech journalists — he interviewed Marconi after the famous radio-assisted Titanic rescue, asking when the ship's radio cat's whisker detectors were going to move from the 3-inch to the 1.5-inch manufacturing process. In typical style, he trapped a senior executive from Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) on a bus. In the Dubai desert.

Really, there was nothing to do but confess.

"'We will be selling an iPhone with 3G capability next month,' Luigi Licciardi, executive vice president for technology and operations at TIM told me yesterday evening on a bus taking us out into the desert for dinner following the first day of the International Electronics Forum 2008 in Dubai," Manners writes.

Not the first time that a big American company has found its holy writ fails to run quite as expected outside the linear borders of the 48 states. All we have to do now is see whether the other rumours — non-exclusivity, discount deals — are true, and if so, whether this means Apple will make that 14 million sales figure being bandied about at the moment.