I attended a press conference a few days ago for a high end smartphone brand. Among us were some tech bloggers, IT journalists and a number of lifestyle editors from the glossies. The product manager enjoyed talking about his new baby – one of the top of the line smartphones that recently hit the market. What was rather peculiar was how he made mention of the Apple iPhone and it sounded more like he was trying to justify why his product X had features Y and Z which the iPhone didn’t have.
Raised eyebrows from a number of tech journalists.
After the …read more

Telcos are doing some huge subsidies. Apparently the $199 price for the iPhone 3G is a huge mask over its real price. Europe has just announced their pricing and with an iPhone-only package out of the box, this will cost USD $773 for the 8GB model and $881 for the 16GB model. Wowzers. OK so what I said about the implications of a $199.00 iPhone and the cellphone industry should be taken with a grain of salt. But what a world it would be, if the pricing was pegged so low. I guess this is one of the reasons why …read more

I’m excited. Really excited. Not much for the new 3G iPhone features, of the fact that you can now sync it over .Mac (renamed to MobileMe). What I’m excited about is competition. Today, Apple announced the new prices for the iPhone 3G: $199 for the 8GB model and $299 for the 16GB upgrade. With Windows Mobile devices costing in the close $600.00 and above, what happens when the world’s most talked about phone get a huge price cut by half? What happens when the world’s most talked about phone acquires Microsoft ActiveSync and Exchange and push email? What happens when …read more

UPDATE: The Apple store is back up with the iPhone 3G being sold

Okay. It really isn’t a big secret anymore, and this was something everybody expected. Apple is capitalizing on 3G data delivery for their new services including GPS and MobileMe, the latter being the rebranded name for .Mac, adding functions such as syncing over the air to your iPhone. It’s sort of like how Plaxo works, actually.
Overall, Apple’s move into the realm of 3G is a tad too late, but they’re making up by trying to innovate with the services – as well as price. The most affordable iPhone …read more