Cars, Phones & Warehouses...

There's been a lot of discussion of Carphone Warehouse and the debacle (as it appears to someone who is now an expat) of their UK Free Broadband offering.
Dean Bubley has a good insight into what's wrong with the CPW business model. It's not possible to sell all brands and provide great support.
Dean hit on the right analogy, Car Dealerships. There are some that deal in multiple brands, but typically they focus on one. The Ford Dealer, the GM dealer etc. Where he got it wrong was including the Operator in the equation.
The network IS important, but it's marginal to the purchase decision.

If I'm buying a car I don't really care about the kind of petrol (gas) that it runs on. I might care if there was some additive that meant that my car can ONLY run on that brand of petrol AND the petrol supplier subsidized the cost of the car down to zero - but that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?

It looks to me like the model will be based on the handset manufacturers, i.e. a Nokia shop, a Motorola shop, an LG shop, rather than a network operator.
Of course, phones are becoming cheaper and we may move to the 'no decent support' model where you buy from supermarket discount chains. Likely they will co-exist, where some will pay a premium in return for better support and expert advice.

I fully expect that the model will switch to the extent that, as car dealerships offer 1 years free petrol, so handsets will come with 1 years free network access. In other words the network is packaged with the hardware as a sweetener. The Sony Mylo is starting this trend over in the US with T-Mobile.

So, did Phones4U just get an exclusive deal with Shell to sell cars?