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Apple will put its new toy — the iPhone — in stores at 6:02pm on Friday, confident that customers will be willing to pay the £80 premium for buying the device in the UK.

The device, which rolls a phone, music player and internet browser into one, sells in the US for $399 (£191), but in the UK customers will have to pay £269, assuming they do not sign up for a contract at the same time.

More than 1,300 locations — including Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores — will be open late this Friday to cope with the anticipated rush of people eager to lay their hands on what the technology world has taken to calling the "Jesus phone".

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Most stores will close at 2pm to reopen at 6pm with the new product on the shelves.

O2, the partner network, has taken on 1,400 staff for the occasion, including one "iPhone specialist" for each of its 450 stores.

Matthew Key, the O2 chief executive, has said that the company aims to sell " hundreds of thousands" of the devices within the first couple of months.

In Apple stores, customers will be free to buy the device on its own, at which point they can take the risk of trying to "unlock" it from O2 — the only official network on which it can be used — using one of the many software packages available on the internet.

Otherwise, they will have to sign up to a minimum 18-month contract with O2 — at £35 a month — which brings the total cost of the package, including the device, to £899.

Existing O2 customers, who are expected to make up the bulk of early sales, will not incur any fee to break their present contract and sign a new 18-month deal so long as they were an O2 customer before September 18, when the deal with Apple was announced.

In the US, Apple sold more than a million iPhones in two and half months after its release in June, but analysts said that the UK market — where customers are accustomed to having a device included with their contract for no extra cost — was very different.

"Our view is that 200,000 in the first couple of months is a very aggressive target," Ben Wood, an analyst with CCS Insight, said.

"This is very different from the frenzied launch in the US, which will not be repeated. In addition, there's an alternative product which people interested in buying into a similar experience can get — the iPod Touch."

But, he said, there were other benefits for O2 to being associated with the iPhone, including the ability to entice more customers than usual into stores out of curiosity, and increased awareness of its brand.

The iPhone runs on a type of network known as EDGE, which is significantly slower than the most advanced technology for mobiles — 3G — and hampers some of the phone's key functions, such as browsing the internet, during which pages can take about 30 seconds to load.

Even then, EDGE is rolled out across only 30 per cent of the country, meaning that if owners stray beyond large cities, where EDGE coverage tends to be widest, speeds will slow down further still.

O2 is hoping, however, that three quarters of internet usage will be via wi-fi, either in users' homes or at one of the 8,000 British wi-fi hotspots run by the Cloud, with whom Apple and O2 have partnered for the launch.

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