Vodafone New Zealand iPhone Plans

So I was refreshing the Vodafone New Zealand site this morning at 10am along with the rest of the country (and probably lots of people beyond) to see what the iPhone plans were going to be for the release of the new Apple iPhone 3G locally. Of course Vodafone were woefully underprepared and the site crashed instantly (Lance calls it amateur hour).

Lucky for Vodafone Mauricio was on to it and managed to keep Geekzone alive despite the traffic jam so we all got to finally see the plans and the initial reactions were not good. Twitter lit up with a roundly negative response…it’s been funny to watch Summize update with peoples opinions. The Geekzone forum has had a similar tone.

My initial reaction was exactly the same, massively disappointed, but with some time to cogitate I’m a little more philosophical about it. I think the reason for the disappointment comes back entirely to the data plans…

1GB just isn’t a lot of data, and $250/mth for it is a hell of a lot to pay. And paying $80/mth for 250MB of data seems even more absurd. To be clear this is about what anyone pays already fopr a data plan in New Zealand…the point is we still have a duopoly situation in the NZ carrier market right now and they are busily making hay while they can.

Now, I’ll wager that very few people get close to using 1GB of mobile data per month right now, and no doubt that’s why Vodafone have released these plans as they have. But that kinda misses the point. The reason we (the geeks) are so excited about the iPhone is because it is the first decent mobile web browsing device. It has a decent processor and OS, and a good browser with innovative UI features making the iPhone a real handy internet device…quite literally in your pocket.

We want to use the device to access the internet and would use it alot if it weren’t so expensive…

• I installed the Google maps mobile app on my old Windows mobile phone a while back and loved it despite the small, clunky version of mobile IE. It was a revelation, until I got the bill and realized that each of those map tiles were consuming extraordinarily expensive data at a rate of knots. Just planning a route across the city would use several MB of data as the maps interface called up all the images.
• I would love to use my cell phone to download media over the air. Browse YouTube, Google Video, TVNZ and TV3’s video on demand, download legal music and podcasts and do any number of other things which would quickly eat data

Given the early comments out of Vodafone I really thought they were going to do something different and roll out data plans that recognized this potential . Instead they’ve gone and just rolled out the same old expensive data that we already have. This is why it is so disappointing. It would be great to see some real customer centricity and forward thinking coming out of Vodafone today, but  guess that was too much to hope for.

All that said, the iPhone is still a killer device, and comparable handsets from other manufacturers probably cost even more than the seemingly high no-plan price of $1129 for the 16GB model (a Nokia N95 is $1200 off plan). I doubt there’s another handset with similar capabilities for less than that. I’ve certainly paid more for handsets in the past so all things considered I’ll still be seeing what it is going to cost to change my plan and get an iPhone 3G…I just don’t think I’ll be lining up at midnight.

UPDATE: And here’s a great chart detailing the TOC for an iPhone in New Zealand. Ouch.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Business, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.