Comes at a Cost

After cleaning up the computer a bit I've found some photos I completely forgot about and some photos that I previously uploaded to Yahoo Photos, until they changed to Flickr and deleted all my photos, so I've re-uploaded them here. I've been meaning to go 'pro' with Flickr but I might wait till I've got a bit more money in my bank account!

Speaking of money, you'd certainly need a lot of it to be able to afford the latest 3G iPhone don't you? $6000 (for one of the plans) for two years seems quite extreme just to be able to make phone calls, text and use the internet on a mobile phone, doesn't it? It may be a reasonable plan in comparison to everything else that is currently on offer in NZ, but it isn't very affordable. A lot of people certainly were expecting a lot more for a lot less (check out the furious responses on NZ Herald and Stuff), but once again we come out worse off when compared to other countries. That's if you wanted to get an iPhone in the first place...

I'm no fan of the iPhone, and was never considering getting one anyway! For a start I don't think the hype is warranted at all! OK so it's an Apple product and it looks fancy, but you can get other phones with more and better features than this phone. Apparently it doesn't have a camera on the front which means you can't really do video-calling, the camera it does have is only 2 megapixel (when you can now get phones with 3.2-5 megapixels!), you can't send pxts...Oh and just a disclaimer too, I don't like Apple either! ;) The very fact they initially made all these exclusive deals and the way they go about designing their products and selling them just makes them sound like the next Microsoft, trying to suck as much money out of us as they possibly can, an impression many people will probably have of Vodafone right now, judging by their responses to the iPhone plans!

I have to admit I always had the impression that Telecom was the money-hungry telco after having dominated the landline/internet/mobile/whateva market for so long, and that Vodafone was our saviour, giving us better offers. I guess they have in some ways (think back to free weekend texting, aaaah yes those were the days! We were promised something so much better in Superprepay, but where's the part where we get free stuff for nothing, including not having to spend money in order to get the free stuff???), and because we only have a duopoly you can't really expect prices to come down too much can you? While I wasn't planning on buying the iPhone, I was hoping the iPhone would be a catalyst for change in mobile data rates (i.e. that they would fall!), something Peter Griffin (from NZ Herald) predicted would happen. I guess not anytime soon anyway!

John Campbell grilled their marketing boss Mark Rushworth, but all he could get out of him was "it's a fantastic phone that comes with blablabla". I'm sure he knew what to expect and was probably told just to stick to the script and try promote the phone as much as possible no matter what he was asked!

Well I guess all we can really do is wait till Telecom get their GSM network up and running, and hope very hard that NZ Communications gets up and running sometime soon and that this will lead to better offers for us at an affordable price! ;)