WDS08 are giving an iPhone away and I want to win it.

Do I want one of those brand new 3G iPhone, YES. But I will wait until what will and see what is going to hap­pen with the offers by all the major tel­cos in Aus­tralia, before committing.

One of the big issues for me and prob­ably 100,000 people liv­ing south of Perth is cov­er­age. The two net­works who announced the will be get­ting the Apple iPhone Voda­fone and Optus, share the same net­work (along with Vir­gin) and 3G cov­er­age stops halfway between my house and Perth. Without 3G it makes the iPhone far less use­ful than my cur­rent Dopod 838Pro (HTC Her­mes) and 8Mb iPod touch com­bin­a­tion (the phone’s HDSPA con­nec­tion can be shared over wifi with the iPod).

So that leaves Tel­stra and my cur­rent car­rier 3. Tel­stra have a big issue with the cur­rent 3G iPhone, it only works on their city net­works, once you get into the coun­try, no 3G. Their NextG net­work is the wrong fre­quency for the cur­rent 3G iPhone. If I was Tel­stra, I would be unwill­ing to sell a phone that only worked on part of my net­work. The other prob­lem with Tel­stra is their data pri­cing, it is 4 or more times expens­ive than the offer­ings from their com­pet­it­ors. Also Tel­stra seems to like 36 month con­tracts, which is way too long for me.

Which leaves 3, I believe 3 announced early on they would not inter­ested in the iPhone. I hope that was in the com­pet­it­ive bid­ding to be the sole net­work for the iPhone and that in an open mar­ket, they will sup­port the iPhone.

That said, there is no reason why an unlocked 3G iPhone will not work on the 3 net­work. So I will wait and see what hap­pens in the Aus­tralian mar­ket­place in the next couple of months and buy one out­right if pos­sible, when the pri­cing is sor­ted out. It will be a lot more than the no more than US$199 for the 8Gb model, Steve Jobs announced. When an 8Gb iPod touch is US$299, the US$199 for an iPhone is tied to a 2 year con­tract. Without a con­tract, the cost in Aus­trlia is likely to be anybody’s guess, but prob­ably in the $700 to $1000 range.

So why do I want to 3G iPhone, well, I only want to carry one devices instead of three (phone, iPod, GPS device), the 3G iPhone does things bet­ter than the 3 devices and finally the Dopod bat­tery does not last well, par­tic­u­larly after 18 months of heavy use. So yes, I would be will­ing to spend big on unlocked 3G iPhone. How­ever, I would much rather win a 3G iPhone which is being offered by Web Dir­ec­tions. All you have to is sign up for Web Dir­ec­tions South 08 before July 10. And see­ing I have been to the last 3 Web Dir­ec­tions South (well Web Dir­ec­tions South 07, Web Dir­ec­tions 06 and Web Essen­tials 05) and see­ing I thor­oughly enjoyed myself and learnt a lot, I am not going to miss going this year. And if you blog about it, your chances of win­ning are tripled.

It looks like I was mis­taken the 3G iPhone oper­ates on 850Mhz which is what Tel­stra uses for it’s NextG ser­vice outisde the big cit­ies, so the iPhone will work on Tel­stra and rumour has it that Tel­stra will be offer­ing iPhones, just not as launch partenrs with Apple.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Just geek, mobile web . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.