Israel is not the only country getting an official Apple Watch rollout next week. Notices on Apple websites around the world indicate that the Apple Watch will launch in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar on February 11th, while the device will also launch in Greece on February 12th. Given that Apple does not have official stores in those regions, much like in Israel, these launches will take place through official Apple distributors.
These launches follow up on the Apple Watch becoming available at 12,000 retail locations since the initial device release in April of last year. Support for the Apple Watch in these regions has been building up over the past few major iOS releases. Last fall, Apple brought Arabic Siri support with iOS 9.2 and iOS 8 added support for Greek Siri. We’ve reported that Apple is preparing to launch additional Apple Watch models with new bands in March.
The Apple Watch’s general availability in the UAE grew when the opening of a pair of official Apple Stores in Dubai and Abu Dhabi last year. Pricing for these international Apple Watch launches is yet to be announced, but the internal Apple product prices usually come in higher than the comparative rates in the United States. If you spot any additional countries rolling out the Apple Watch next week, feel free to let us know in the comments.
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Unfortunately, there is no support for Siri in Greek yet. Hopefully not for long. :)
we are too small a market and our language is far too complex for Apple to bother making Siri available in Greek :/
a bit of proof reading wouldn’t hurt – what country is Omar???? You meant Oman, no?
oh man, someone dropped the ball
Siri gave him the wrong info.
Glad to see my country in the headlines Lolz..Oman
who did the translation??? OMG! “ειδωμενο”??????? lol
Do we really still think Apple are announcing a new Watch next month considering they’re still rolling out the current one?
Why not? It may take this long to get the Apple Watch 2 over there also! This really doesn’t change anything.
There’s no way in hell that apple is announcing anything other than additional straps next month. All this speculation of “s” type upgrades to the internals makes zero sense. imagine how the israeli and these buyers would feel?!
I still don’t understand why Apple opted for this kind of slow rollout of the watch. The Iphone is practically immediately available everywhere as soon as it’s launched. If they didn’t think they would sell it so well, then this will definitely not help. If I lived in one of this countries, at this point I wouldn’t buy a watch with all the rumors of the new model coming at the end of the year.
The original iPhone’s international roll out was not at all available quickly after launch. It was US (and canada?) only for a long while.
There were a small number of key countries who did get it,, but it took months (including the UK, and France if i recal). It wasn’t until the iPhone 3G that international availability was more quickly available in key markets within the first few weeks.
We can put that down to the fact that every country needed a tweaked version of the hardware to suit that country’s networks, agreements with mobile networks, all sorts of very elaborate and complicated hurdles. The watch has none of those issues, it is an accessory that can be rolled out globally without any such hurdles.
It’s certainly true the phone was more complex for those early iPhone roll outs. I was merely responding to the fallacy that the original iPhone had a faster roll out than the watch.