Wal-Mart to sell iPhone

Wal-Mart finally confirmed Friday what everyone who follows Apple already knew:

Walmart will begin selling Apple’s IPhone 3G at nearly 2,500 Wal-Mart stores starting (Get out that red marker, you can circle your calendars now) Sunday Dec. 28 — three days after Christmas.

It's been reported that Wal-Mart will sell the red-hot mobile device for $197 for the 8GB model and $297 for the 16GB model, (or $2 off their current prices.) There had been rumors that Wal-Mart would sell a $99 iPhone, but hey, Wal-mart is "The place with the falling prices" so perhaps soon sometime soon?.
Wal-Mart, however, appears to be giving individual store managers some wiggle room on prices. According to the press release, the company’s price match policy will allow stores to “match the price of any local competitor’s advertised store price on the same item within the same promotional period.”

Best Buy is currently offering the iPhone for $190 for the 8GB and $290 for the 16GB models.

Getting the iPhone into Wal-Mart is something of a coup for Apple.

Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retail chain — by far — with more than 7,000 mega-stores around the world and some 2.1 million employees.

Walmart finished its last fiscal year with nearly $380 billion in sales — earning it the No. 1 slot in the Fortune 500.

The move represents the fourth major expansion of the iPhone’s retail presence outside Apple’s own 200-plus stores. The phone was sold first at AT&T’s 2,000 retail outlets, then at nearly 1,000 Best Buy outlets, and then at the tens of thousands of points of sale (many of them no more than mom-and-pop kiosks) that carry iPhones for Apple’s overseas partners.

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster has estimated that Apple could easily sell as many iPhones through Wal-Mart stores in 2009 as it sells through its own Apple Stores — by his calculation, about 4.5 million units.

Will the move work? we'll have to wait and see, Am I going to rush on over to Walmart to pick one up? ummm.. not just yet... It's been at the Rogers Video, which is only 10 minutes away from me right now, taunting me each time I walk in and I haven't gotten one yet, Walmart, takes me a little bit longer to get to... a $99 Iphone... maybe, Maybe when the monthly price plans from Rogers get a little bit better and more affordable.