Apple’s next-generation iPhone could be available in Britain for about £100 next month, as the computer company adjusts its strategy to boost sales.

Apple is expected by analysts to allow mobile phone operators to subsidise the touch-screen handset, which is likely to use third-generation technology, giving it much faster internet access and download speeds.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive and co-founder of Apple, is expected to unveil the new phone during his keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference in San Francisco on June 9. Unlike the original, Britons will be able to buy it soon.

A source close to the deal said that the new model was expected to be on shops’ shelves by July, very shortly after the launch in the United States. There was a gap of several months between the American and British launches of the original devices.

UBS analysts believe that the new iPhone could be available across Europe for as little as €99, but think that this price is unlikely to be that low in the UK, where O2, the mobile operator, has a multi-year exclusive deal for the iPhone, suggesting that a British price could be close to £100.

Ben Wood, a CCS Insight analyst, said: “They are also looking for more flexibility on how the operators can price the iPhone, although I am not convinced that they will let them have open season on the price, as they have a lucrative iPod market to protect.”

Cutting the price and ending exclusivity will help Apple to meet its target of selling ten million iPhones by the end of the year. It is a long way short of that. At the end of December the exclusive carriers for Britain, Germany and France — O2, T-Mobile and Orange — had sold 330,000 phones between them, but industry sources say that European iPhone sales were forecast at 500,000 to 600,000 units.

Apple’s former strategy — in which operators pay upfront for the iPhone, sell it to customers with a small mark-up plus VAT, and pay an estimated 15 per cent of average revenue per user to Apple — has begun to crumble in Europe. In April Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, said that carriers were free to price the iPhone as low as they wished and followed it with a U-turn on operator exclusivity.

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