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Confusion reigns about the exact details of Vodacom's
pricing plans for the iPhone. What’s confusing most people is the promise
that Apple CEO Steve Jobs made when the device was launched in June.
At the launch, he maintained that the device would cost no more than $199
wherever in the world you purchased it.
This, of course, is the price you would pay if you were to take out a 24-month
contract along with the phone. Not the cash price. So the R6 389 that you
pay for the 8GB version and the R7 569 you pay for the 16GB model has little or
nothing to do with what Jobs announced at the iPhone 3G launch.
Looking at the pricing on contract that Vodacom
has announced, it would appear that the company has skimped a little on the
handset subsidy, choosing instead to put that money into the bundling of a
miserly 250 megabytes (MB) of data and 100 SMSs
into the contract.
If you consider that the most you would have to pay for an 8 gigabyte (GB)
iPhone is the equivalent of $268 the picture looks a little, but not much,
rosier.
There are two things that Vodacom needs to
take credit for stuffing up on this launch. First, even if you are giving them
almost R1 000 a month you are not getting a free phone. If I am willing to
commit to that amount of cash on a monthly basis I would expect to get
something without having to fork out R1 800($220).
Secondly, and most importantly, the 250MB that Vodacom
is giving us to play with is woefully inadequate. At the media launch, Vodacom's
Chris Ross said that the experience across the Vodafone
group was that people tended to use between 70MB and 80MB per month of data.
Personally I find this hard to believe. Maybe if the majority of people are
using it as a phone with the occasional look-up of something on the web but
considering that I managed to rack up 20MB is just a couple of days doing
nothing but checking e-mail and surfing the web occasionally - and colleagues
of mine have reported figures much higher than that - it would seem that it
won't be hard to run over almost every month.
Even if Ross is correct then there seems no point to limiting the
amount of data we can use. If your average is 80MB do you care if someone uses
a giga byte?
When Rogers in Canada (a company with reportedly
very similar business principles to local telcos)
announced packages with only 1GB of data there was almost an uprising. They
later introduced a special offer that gave iPhone users 6GB of data.
So why then should SA's users be short
changed with this pathetic pretend offer of free data? Any person that uses the
phone for what it was intended will be paying R1.50 a MB before the month is
half gone.
I never thought I would say this, being the resident Apple fanatic, but
I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone buy the iPhone at the moment.
Maybe Vodacom
will come to its senses and bundle a reasonable amount of data with the device
if consumers apply a bit of pressure.
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