Orange has begun selling the iPhone in France for 399 euros (US$588) with a two-year subscription, the same price as T-Mobile in Germany…but the unlocked version will cost 649 euros (US$956) “to which the user will have to add 100 euros if another operator is used” reports Reuters. That’s a lot less than the 999 euros T-Mobile is charging for unlocked phones. The exclusivity period is for more than two years, and Orange France director Louis-Pierre Wenes is quoted in Le Figaro as saying: “To be clear, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) could one day extend distribution to other players ... But in that case we have guarantees that they will be sold with Orange contracts.” There’s already some grey-market iPhones in France for slightly cheaper than Orange’s unlocked phones, although one company selling them—phoneandphone.com—at the end of October agreed to stop selling them until the product was launched in France following legal threats from Apple reports AP.

Maybe the France launch is why there has been a lot of iPhone related news lately, such as AT&T dissing Verizon’s “open” announcement because it has the handset. Other references include:

—Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM) CEO Paul Jacobs has praised the iPhone for attracting attention to the fact that mobile phones can send and receive data. “Qualcomm could have spent huge amounts of money advertising 3G and not gotten the point across as well as the iPhone has,” he said in NYT.

—CNet has taken the opportunity to argue that Apple is going to have a much tougher time selling iPhones in Europe than it is in the US: “Simply put, Europe is different. Entering the European mobile phone market from the United States is like getting called up to the majors after just a few months in the minors.” Most of the argument that Apple wasn’t prepared for the market is based on price changes and discrepencies, but it’s a good read.

—NYT has a piece on Widgets, describing them as a way to get some of the iPhone’s handy services without having to shell out for an iPhone. Nothing particularly new, but it does tie in with Jacobs’ argument that the iPhone is promoting the concept of mobile data and content.

—Update: Like the UK’s O2 and Germany’s T-Mobile, France’s Orange has an unlimited data plan for iPhone customers. But it appears that as with the other two exclusive carriers of the iPhone in Europe, Orange’s definition of “unlimited” is bound by fine print. For Orange iPhone customers, modem access, voice over IP, peer-to-peer, and newsgroups usage are “strictly forbidden” and the monthly data cap is 500 MO (500 MB) a month.