iPhone fails to grip Germany

By Nicola Leske and Georgina Prodhan

COLOGNE/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Hundreds of German Apple fans braved rain and wind before dawn to be among the first in Europe to get their hands on an iPhone but the arrival of the year's hottest consumer gadget passed most Germans by.

A few hundred people lined up at a Deutsche Telekom shop in Cologne, where T-Mobile let customers buy the music-playing and Web-browsing device at midnight before the phone went on sale across the country later in the day.

Sales staff cheered and applauded when the first dozen customers entered the store in the downtown shopping district of Cologne across from a Vodafone store.

Telecoms group Vodafone lost out to T-Mobile and Telefonica's O2 and France Telecom to sell the iPhone in Europe but will start selling a similar multimedia handset from Samsung Electronics on Friday.

T-Mobile representatives handed out blankets, umbrellas as well as hot tea, coffee and pretzels for those waiting outside.

"All of us are Mac (Apple Macintosh computer) fans," said a man who works in a MP3 store and was waiting with two of his friends. "The iPhone is the best phone in the world," he said.

Deutsche Telekom Chief Executive Rene Obermann has pinned high hopes on the iPhone, which he said will attract new customers in Germany, where the firm faces tough competition.

Europe's biggest telecoms group by sales declined to give a sales expectation and did not say how many phones it had in stock. A T-Mobile spokesman merely said: "We have plenty."