The announced Italian price is interesting, does this indicate the likely O2 pay as you go price? If so, it seems a bit steep.

Iphone mania starts again (my dad's bigger than yours). So prepay is more expensive now than original cost in Italy! Or 24 month contracts at ridiculous prices for probabley less (token) minutes.

Either way they (Apple+networks) are gonna have you. Cant win,

All just for the privilge of a good User interface.

Paris b'cos even she cant spot an apple bargain here!

Make me an offer I can't refuse

I agree with KazR - the price for pay as you go is interesting.

And a bit of a rip-off, I think.

If o2 launch the payg model at this price, I suspect a good 50% of those who may have been considering buying one will no longer be considering it. Surely common sense would tell o2 to keep the price down, in order to gain a greater customer base?

And with still no indication of the tariff, I can't help but imagine that too will be a considerable rip-off.

Oh well. Another item crossed off the wish-list.

the £45 tarriff gives you the iPhone 3g for nothing - so that's better than €1!

They are deliberatey making the iPhone prohibitively expense to prevent "box breakers" from jail breaking the handset.

Our outlet saw something like a 500% increase in sales once that iPhone was reduced from £269 to £169

We sold out within a week and I doubt very much many got activated as Apple instructed.

The real question for the pay as you go iPhone is: what will the data charges be like? Judging by most such contracts, you'd pay more in data charges to download a song than it would cost you to buy the whole album. Every page view on a website could end up costing you a quid. This is hardly conducive to the iPhone's "browse anywhere" image.

I'd quite happily pay a reasonable price for a pay as you go iPhone (£200 or so?) if I thought that using it afterwards wouldn't break the bank. Otherwise, I'll stick with my trusty old Sony Ericsson - the screen may be too small to browse comfortably, but at least that stops me doing it very often.

Sixty Euros a month for two years!

That’s 1440 European Euros or 1134 Great British Pounds!

Given a you get a fairly decent contract for about 25 Euros a

month that amounts to an 840 Euro "f<del>cool tax".

A whopping great 660 Scottish Pounds I wont be spending.

(The Scottish pound has a one to one exchange rate with the English

pound for accounting purposes but, mysteriously, much less purchasing power).

The O2 PAYG price was already announced as £259.

Why would I bother wasting my time on a phone that is no more than a glorified ipod/MP3 player? Get tied into expensive and long term contracts where I get take through the cleaners for a phone which I am not allowed to do anything with it.

So you can get a 16 gig iTouch for c£200 retail, and can also buy a cheap £3G phone from nokia for £80 retail. Yet taking the iTouch and adding just the 3G gubbins to it, apparently means we should pay £400 retail (or more) for an unlocked 16Gb iPhone.

Apple are still having a laugh on this one.

Until they realise that not everyone wants to be tied to o2's rubbish 3G network they will have to continue to scratch their heads and wonder why so many people who'd like an iPhone won't be buying one any time soon.

Didn't Steve Jobs say that the 8GB 3G IPhone would never cost more than $199 no matter where you bought it in the world ?

If that pre-paid price plan is to be mirrored by O2, we're talking £450 for a 16gb.

That is definately steep.

If O2 were come in at £300 I'd snap one up, highly doubtful though.

Prepay phones are always a lot more expensive than contract.. £450 would be about right for a 16GB.

Unfortunately O2 are keeping silent on what they're really going to charge, and with their 128kbps caps on HSPDA and their poor coverage I'm tempted to go PayG anyway and wait for the unlock so I can get on a network that acutally works.

£259?

Announced where please? 02 website only says says "coming soon ..."

Tim

...where are the reviews of the new HTC Touch Pro and SonyEricsson Xperia X1?

O2 plan includes unlimited data and free wi-fi at the Cloud and as of 11th July BT Openzone.

I'll be upgrading my iPhone to a nice new shiny 3G one.

Frankly I'm a bit sorry that they didn't keep the price high, it stops all the peasants and whining bastards getting one.

well the o2 bit on data appears to be 'limited only by network capacity', as long as they think it one person using the thing for non commercial usage. though how exactly they can decide that is anyones guess.

obviously they could try a hard limit, but since this is a phone, and they will of course be tracking all those data packets (well at least the URL visited) since they basically have to, you could easily pull a list from them via a data protection request if need be, and ask them to point out which bits are commercial traffic.

of course they can always throttle the speed if you use it too much, but since its not a modem and i can't see the point of a p2p client on it, what with so little memory, it should be ok.

unlike the rest of us with o2's 'standard' data tariffs which are scary.

seriously considering one in fact, reckon my monthly data will be a gig or so of 3g/edge/gsm usage maybe less, virtually all email and websites, not much utube etc since i can't see it being fast enough. but for forums? yeah why not.

...you also have to solemnly agree to the 'Siegfried Oath'...

"...Ze penalty for breaking [which] is DESS!..."

http://www.sweetslyrics.com/602058.The%20Producers%20movie%20-%20Der%20Guten%20Tag%20Hop-Clop.html

What happened to the iPhone will cost no more than $199 WHEREVER it is sold in the world?

Or is this bu$în€$$ speak for "it will be 'possible' to get an iPhone for $199 or less but you have to sign up for a massive tariff" which will end up costing you more in the long run.

Thats annoyed me, I was all up for buying one too, I know my parents were as well. Surely its in their interests to sell a cheaper phone to MANY more people than a rip-off to a few.

Glad they've dropped the price.

I won't feel guilty now as I throw my Orange SE P990i in the nearest scrap heap where it belongs. Orange won't or couldn't unlock it so I could get rid of the appalling Orange 990 software, so it's good by SE 990 and ORANGE and hello to Apple and O2.

A whining, peasant bastard !!!!

Coming from industry sources the 8GB iPhone will be selling for around £300 pay as you go, no mention of a 16GB version yet. But as stated it will be about £99 on a standard £35p/m tariff or free on £45p/m.

The tariffs come with the usual unlimited data allowance and free access to The Cloud.

Interestingly enough they are also removing the post-activation process which allowed the original to be jail broken so easily. So from now on all iPhones will have to be activated in store. How this will work for direct sales is unknown at this point.

Another side note is that iPhone users bandwidth is apparently uncapped, its only standard data usage from other phones which is limited to 128kbps. Considering this isnt even enough to stream media from iTunes or YouTube I think o2 are in for tough times with bandwidth throttles and such in the near future as the iPhone kiddies start streaming pr0n to their "Jesus 2.0" phones.

nuff said

I think you'll find that I can break the contract perfectly well, tyvm. Restraint of trade ? Overly broad ? It's like the unenforceable click-through agreements on software...

would someone like Hedley Lamarr want to stop what he calls the 'peasants and whining bastards' from having one? So that his vanity can shine through? So that he can appear better than the have-nots? So that he can appear to be yet another pathetic twat?

It's exactly the kind of pathetic, snotty, up-my-own-self-important-arse attitude that irritates the fuck out of everyone else.

It's a phone, for fucks sake. A phone. Why on earth do twats like you consider it so important that no-one else can possibly have one? Will you be wandering around with it glued to your ear, or merely waving it around - show-off style - in front of everyone's face, willy nilly? With the attitude you display, I'm surprised you have enough friends that'd want to call you on the bloody thing!

I sincerely hope that once you've upgraded your shiny new 3G one that you discover just how shite the o2 3G experience is.

Oh and that a much better model is just around the corner, just as you've been stupidly locked into your stupidly expensive contract.

Of course, if you were merely being sarcastic then I take all those words back :@)

If not, then I reiterate my thinking that you are a nothing but a pompous twat.

Well perhaps, but i'd rather be a peasant than stumping up for what should be iphone 1.0!!!

The original one didn't have 3g... that was a big fat apple style two fingers at anyone not in America... as usual from a Californian company.

I own a mac and its worse than windows for assuming there is nowhere outside the US of no 3G.

I'm not slating apple or iphones as products, just the fools who pay through the nose for them before there are complete!

(Which is not me as bought my mac in the states and paid in dollars what it was retailing here in pounds.)

When my £35 a month contract ran out in November, I went pay-as-you-go. I have spent £40 so far this year (all of 2008 so far) on my phone. Brilliant.

OK, it's a crappy sony ericson from 2 years ago and the camera don't work. The only things I need from a phone are:

1.) Voice

2.) Voice

3.) Text

4.) ..... nah, thats it.

Spot on. 'Nuff said.

Don't know what all this talk is that you cannot stream youtube and that O2 is capping the speeds....Sounds like a lot of people on here have actually got no experience what so ever of the iphone...

Youtube streams just fine on edge, no problem at all. Get your facts straight before slagging off products you obviously don't have...

So Apple can get stuffed. Nice kit, but with bullshit like this I'm happy to hold on and grab an Android when they come about.

I just got a new phone which does away with all those cumbersome menus and touch interfaces, tapping away at a touchscreen and clunky email clients etc.

You simply speak into it at one end and the person at the other can hear you insuring instanteous, interactive personal communication. In your own voice too, instead of some impersonal, badly spelled electronic rendering. It shuns Google maps for a sense of direction and the ability to read road signs. This works even when the phone is off thus delivering unrivalled battery life!

Frankly, I'm stunned at the technology behind this, how can Apple be so far behind the Zeitgeist?

Amazingly this phone was FREE, thus freeing valuable financial resources each month to clear the credit card bills for all that other electronic tat you bought that you thought might really improve you sorry existance and didn't. It also has the added bonus that it doesn't look like you have an ingot of some metal stuck to your ear, like some fashion faux-pas earring. Best of all it doesn't give you a falsely elevated sense of social standing, but then what item of mass produced Chinese electronics and near-future landfill, available to everyone should?

Could this be the, you know, coolest phone, like evah?

>the £45 tarriff gives you the iPhone 3g for nothing - so that's better than €1!

I make it the £45 tarriff gives you the iPhone 3g for £810 over 18 months. You can only consider it to cost you nothing if you use all the inclusive airtime, and don't get fleeced for anything else over that 18 months.

Jobs said 'in most countries' you wont pay more than the equivalent of $199

You just *know* he wasn't talking about Rip Off Britain.

My contract will be up at some point near Christmas, and my contract is already about £45 a month anyway on my Tmobile Flext tariff... so providing the contract on o2 is alright, I might consider one.

Evil Jobs - because like Google did with all my webtools (mail/search/calendar/shopping/IM/homepage), he is slowly taking over my life!! :(

do people consistently point out that the iPhone costs £800 etc over 18 months when this is the way mobile phone contracts HAVE ALWAYS worked?

You get a subsidised phone. The amount of that subsidy depends on how much you pay the network provider monthly over a fixed period of time, I mean ffs, EVERY phone I've ever owner has been purchased under this model. The iPhone doesn't cost £800 over 18 months. In case you hadn't realised, you do actually get service within that period. Get over yourselves already!

Virtually every phone I've ever gotten has been "worth" around £300 unsubsidised, and I paid over £200 once on pay-as-you-go (just so I wasn't tied down, which was stupid frankly) so in reality these prices are pretty average.