iPhone prices
Vodafone has announced its pricing for the iPhones which go on sale on Friday, and its certainly not cheap.
The phone itself starst at $199, but only if you to a $6,000 contract over two years. Yeah thought not.
Their cheapest plan is not so bad – $80 a month which includes 120 minutes of calls (4 minutes a day), 600 texts (20 a day) and 250 MB of data (8Mb a day which isn’t bad). The phone will cost $549 or $699 (for 16GB phone) on top of that.
The $250 a month plan gives you 600 minutes or 20 minutes a day. No increase in texts (600) and a nice 1 GB of data.
I hope prices will drop over time. They probably have them high now because they know there will be some peopel who will pay anything for an iPhone. Personally I would hold off and wait for some lower prices as will be inevitable when they want more customers.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
iPhones are over rated pieces of shit… Seriously… I’d take this anyday http://www.htc.com/www/product.aspx?id=46278
Apple products are fashion accessories, nothing more.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Gutted! We are offered the most expensive plan in the world.
I was looking forward to making the switch from Telecom…
Both the herald and Stuff are running blogs on this. Overwhelming responses are that we are being ripped off.
Parallel importers here I come
July 8th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I have been following this story over at geekzone.co.nz and generally people aren’t happy. The prices are a bit of a joke. I can’t see too many people standing outside the vodafone stores at midnight waiting to buy these things.
You can’t even buy them on prepay.
Wait another month until the parallel importers start bringing them in I think.
July 8th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I agree with FTC. I have to admit I was shocked at how expensive they were. And that they don’t do prepay, which is very suckful. Won’t be as many people out and about with them after all.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
$6000
Erm…for a phone! And some web browsing! And some music! Woo-hoo!
I like the look of the thing, but I’ll be waiting a few years until Vodafone return to planet earth in terms of pricing.
Perhaps I should have said “if”….
July 8th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
I’ve been looking forward to this announcement, as I think the iPhone would be a good work phone / PDA – visual voicemail is one feature I like the sound of for example, and it is a lot cleaner looking than a blackberry. But these prices are just ridiculous (although not surprising). You realise how much Vodafone here is a ripoff when you have been overseas. If there was competition between multiple GSM providers like in Europe the prices would be driven down, but here they can charge what they like. I think I’ll have to forget about an iPhone for now.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
$199 plus $6000 sign up fee, you have to be joshing. Shit I would except a run on WINZ, all the hip young beneficiaries will want one of these babys, emergency benefit payouts will be up this month.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
My understanding is that iPhones are very data hungry. They download data on a whim and you may not even know. 1Gb/month is easy, apparently.
The holy grail, of sorts, is a phone that will use cellular network wireless for data as a last resort, and use 802.11 whenever it is available (like when you’re at home or at work). I believe Openmoko phones will do that. I don’t think iPhones will.
I was excited about iPhone until I saw the prices. Disappointing. I do not understand why the cost of data however it is delivered is so high in New Zealand.
July 8th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Here is a useful wee table
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/07/07/iphone-3g-prices-and-plans-for-21-countries
I have the original iphone – great phone, and would have bought a 3G from Voda if they hadn’t been so greedy.
Guess I will wait till Teleskum get theirs and we can get some competition
July 8th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Sounds more like an iGouge to me…
July 8th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
The fact that Vodafone charges anything for an iPhone when you agree to spend $6000 with them over the next two years says one of two things. One: iPhones have market power. Or two, Vodafone has market power.
I imagine a perfectly good business case could be mounted for Vodafone to pay somebody $4000 to take an iPhone in exchange for signing up to that $6000 plan – or alternatively giving it away and only charging $2000. The difference between that $2000 and $6000 is market power – so is it the phone or Vodafone that has it?
July 8th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Just watched John Campbell maul Mark Rushmore(Vodafone) about the iPhone pricing. Poor old Mark… he was very well savaged. He tried to answer every question with “Look……… we have a range of plans starting from $50….” While John repeatedly quoted detailed offshore prices/plans/terms that showed Vodafone to be absolutely reaming the NZ public. Quite funny. I’ll bring one back from the UK once hacks are readily available. No hurry.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Actually, what Vodafone is asking for the iPhone is better than Telecom’s deal for the HTC titan and way better than the deal I had to sign 3 years ago to get the HTC Harrier.
Ah, the joys of a duopoly…
There’s something wrong with having to pay a dumb amount of money for a smartphone.
July 9th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I think Vodafone have badly misjudged this one, from a regulatory point of view.
I figure Vodafone have priced the iPhone in relation to the pricing of their other handsets … like Blackberrys and the high-end smartphones. So the pricing is “internally consistent” shall we say.
But they haven’t thought through the “Big Mac index” factor … where there’s an identical product being released worldwide at exactly the same time, and allowing simple apples-with-apples comparisons from country to country. That comparison just shows up how steep Vodafone’s mobile charges are here in NZ (and Telecom’s too for that matter).
The Commerce Commission have taken a look at mobile pricing before, but decided not to act. Now though they have a perfect excuse to step in and regulate. And public sympathy would be strongly behind them now too – look at John Campbell’s tone last night. Vodafone would do well to look at what happened to Telecom when it fell foul of the Govt/regulator. The Govt got a “free hit”, positive publicity and all the voters cheered. A ruling party that’s 20% behind in the polls with less than 4 months till an election might feel that whacking Vodafone would bring them a lot of good news. It’d be stupid to goad a bear like that … and Voda are looking plenty stupid at the moment.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
ben:
Openmoko does look promising, but I’m not holding my breath. The hardware is lower spec to the iPhone, and the project could just fizzle out. If they make it to a consumer version I’ll certainly look at getting one, would be the perfect companion to my Linux laptop.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Slightly OT, but I’ll point out that Number Portability did wonders for mobile data plans here in Singapore. Might be of interest to telecoms geeks.
Just 3-4 months ago I was paying $25/month (on top of voice plan) for a piddling amount of data (maybe 10Mb) and crazy per-kilobyte charges for exceeding the cap.
IDA pushed the carriers to implement true number portability (centralised number database shared between carriers) and this launched last month. In the months leading up to the launch date the carriers were falling over themselves offering new plans.
Now I pay $16/month for 50Gb of 3G data (which is near enough to unlimited for me – I can’t use anywhere near 50Gb in a month). Same carrier.
Maurice Williamson’s hands-off approach to telecommunications always bugged me. It bugs me even more that he might be laying his mitts on that portfolio next year.
July 9th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
jim, to be fair to poor old VFNZ… we have a very expensive country to cover. sparce population and undulating terrain all add up to one of the worlds highest cost-per-customer networks, in terms of celltower infrastructure, backhaul etc.
actually this is what Mark Rushmore should have said to neutralise Campbell’s price comparison attacks…. even if it’s only part of the justification. the balance VFNZ’s is sucessfully using its strong brand to gouge consumers… who have relatively little choice.
July 9th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
getstaffed, I agree that VFNZ’s network costs are obviously significantly higher with the sparse population. That’s not the end of the story though. Australia and Canada are more sparse than NZ (yes, but they have bigger cities, I know).
My point was not to make a direct comparison with VFNZ prices but rather to show the effect that number portability had. I’m sure these new prices (in SG) are not just a coincidence. Losing your phone number is a fairly big barrier to switching carrier – it held me back for the past 6 years. I could have had better data rates but chose not to.
Perversely, now that number portability is in place I think less people will find the need to switch…
December 27th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
What about people who bought a normal iPhone before 3G came out, will Vodaphone NZ offer them a discount?