As mentioned on Sunday in swiss newspapers, Vodafone wants to sell his 25% stake in Swisscom back to the biggest telco in Switzerland. The quotes from the Register article shed some light on Vodafone's policy shift:

Vodafone has made two key changes of policy in its core European territories - reducing handset subsidies to the extent that 3G phone sales have nosedived, and planning to defocus its marketing efforts on advanced video-driven applications like MMS (Multimedia Messaging) in favour of using its more efficient 3G networks to compete on pricing in traditional services.
[...] Vodafone will rethink how to gain some short term ROI from its 3G networks - and low cost, VoIP-killing voice does seem the most obvious, if least lucrative, option - and how quickly it may be able to attract users to 3G-plus services, a vital calculation if it is to justify its currently ongoing rollout of HSDPA.

Whereas the japanese operators continue to deploy 3G speedily, europeans are falling behind. An explanation to this is the subsidizing of phones which make it difficult to cut costs on tariffs too. As T-Mobile CEO Obermann said at 2005's 3GSM:

"We are at the crossroads between device cost and usage cost. Drop subsidy and we can cut tariffs. Customers want lower tariffs. They drive usage and loyalty. Subsidy needs to be cut, then removed."

This is a vicious circle - the phone subsidizing being somehow the equivalent of the free internet services without the possibility of ad-spending - and I think the subsidizing has to change in quality as well. Wouldn't it make sense to subsidize only 3G phones which offer good mobile internet capabilities, decent lens quality (with macro) and music storage, but without all the schlock of video phoning and mobile tv etc.? From time to time I wonder why operators and handset manufacturers want to go faster than the consumer can follow. As long as s/he doesn't understand the simple and basic stuff, it will be difficult to move up on the higher layers.

On the other hand, as long as operators do not create a healthy environment for innovative, but also more pragmatic consumer services by third parties, we will hardly see a quicker adoption. The japanese operators have understood this early on, whereas european operators continue to serve mainly business clients and tend to disregard the rest of the population.