Orange prices up iPhone en France
Quelle surprise
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Orange has priced up the 3G iPhone: it'll cost French folk €149 ($234/£118) for the 8GB model, or €199 ($312/£158) for the 16GB version.
The handset will go on sale in France on 17 July, and those prices apply to new Orange customers who take out one of its dedicated iPhone airtime packages, or one of its Origimi Star, First or Jet bundles.
Other airtime packages are available, but punters will have to pay €199 ($312/£158) and €249 ($390/£198), for the 8GB and 16GB phones respectively, if they want one of those.
Orange Business Services customers will also be offered the 3G iPhone, but Orange isn't giving details until launch day.
The official iPhone tariff contains airtime bundles ranging from €49-149 ($77-234/£39-118) a month. Other packages start at €32 ($50/£25) a month.
Anyone who already owns an iPhone - specifically, people who bought one before 12 June - will get a new, 3G one for €99 ($155/£78) if they're willing to sign up for a two-year airtime contract. They'll also get to the head of queue on launch day, Orange owner France Telecom indicated.
The downside is that this isn't an up-front saving: it's a €100 ($157/£79) money-back deal that's time-limited to 31 October 2008.
Buying an iPhone for the first time will also require a 24-month sign-up, if you want the subsidised price.
Orange did not say how much it will offer for either an unlocked phone - which it has to offer, under French law - or for pay-as-you-go usage.
COMMENTS
RE: O2 PAYG
"Apparently last night O2 put up a page with iPhone PAYG prices for the UK (299 pounds for the 8GB model), but it seems to have been pulled."
If that's the case, they can go screw themselves.
At the risk of showing my ignorance regarding mobile telephony. can someone answer me this: I currently have a phone with a T-Mobile (UK) SIM card in it - let's say I decided, on a whim, to pop over to Germany and pick up an iPhone, what are the chances (if any) that my existing T-Mobile SIM would work in the German iPhone?
Purely hypothetical (at the moment) but a tempting prospect nonetheless, since I'm quite happy with T-Mobile's service and having ditched O2 a while ago for being utterly crap I'd rather not sign up with them again, PAYG or not.
@ Ron Eve
No problem debranding your phone, and for free as long as you have the USB cable that came with the phone.
Pop along to http://forums.se-nse.net/ and either look at the guides posted on how to do it or have a chat in the newbie section.
We'll get your phone back to it's former glory in no time ;)
Un-branding phones
After shopping around for a while, I had decided that the HTC Hermes was the best phone to replace my aging Sony P800. The best price to be had was from Telstra (OZ Telco equivalent of BT, with the same effective monopoly drawback and the added inconvenience of having gone "public") as the iMate JasJam (stupid name).
Got the phone home, wasn't bad, but something didn't feel right about it. Got on the net, found *several* sites about the HTC Hermes software and realised that Telstra had f*cked the hell out of the phone (the Wi-Fi LAN functions were almost non-existent, for example). Two downloads (one for the main OS and utilities, one for an upgraded set of radio drivers) and a re-sync later and I had a phone which simply shat over the old iMate version.
Haven't looked back since.
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