By Sherine El Madany – Daily News

CAIRO, EGYPT – Apple’s iPhone 3G will soon be available in Egypt, and Vodafone Egypt is reportedly gearing up to be the first mobile operator to sell the high-tech gadget in the Arab world’s most populous country.

Customers nationwide can pre-register online and be notified when the phone arrives to Vodafone Egypt’s stores, according to a telecom source who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Vodafone — the world’s leading international mobile communications group – sealed a deal with Apple in May to bring iPhone 3G to 10 countries where the mobile operator is present. According to news reports, Vodafone now sells the phone in Australia, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal, and it is expected to bring it to Egypt, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, South Africa and Turkey later this year.

Up to now Apple has insisted on exclusive agreements with carriers, striking deals with AT&T in the US, O2 in Britain, Orange in France, and Deutsche Telekom in Germany. In exchange for exclusivity, Apple takes a cut of the revenue that wireless operators collect for voice and data services each month, something no other phone maker is believed to get.

iPhone 3G combines all the revolutionary features of iPhone with 3G networking that is twice as fast as the first generation iPhone, built-in GPS for expanded location based mobile services, and iPhone 2.0 software which includes support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and runs the hundreds of third party applications already built with the recently released iPhone SDK.