O2 starts giving away iPhones
Just place your first-born here
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
UK operator O2 is going to start handing out free iPhones from April 3, for punters prepared to sign up to a two-year contract or pay almost £45 for 18 months.
The new tariffs include the usual unlimited data and hotspot access, but those wanting the 16GB iPhone will have to commit to paying £44.05 every month for the next two years, a total of £1057.20, but they will have a shiny iPhone with nothing down.
Anyone prepared to make do with 8GB will only have to stump up £34.26 for a couple of years, though they'll also have to squeeze their voice calls into 600 minutes a month - so if ten hours of nattering isn't enough for you, then you'll be wanting the more expensive contract that bundles twenty hours of solid conversation.
As phone models age it's normal for the subsidy on them to increase, and even with Apple refreshing the OS to keep the iPhone current that is holding true. But with the subsidy comes operator control - once the operator is paying for the handset they get a much greater hand in dictating the feature set, which may be one of the reasons we're finally seeing MMS with the next iPhone update. ®
COMMENTS
Beg pardon?
There's just so many things wrong with this article, it's untrue. For starters, the iPhone 3G has been available for free from O2 on the top 18mth contract (circa £45pm) since the day it was released last June. Bearing that in mind, I'm at a loss as to what's actually new/different about these new tarriffs other than the fact that they're 2 years rather 18 months. What's the story here Reg? Are we readers supposed to investigate for ourselves?
Apart from all that, and leaving aside my own horror at the idea of a 2 year contract, *surely* we all know the difference between the price of a phone and the cost of running it? Until the average cost of any other free phone on contract is a monthly £0 (something which hasn't happened even once in the last twenty years such products have been avaialble) it seems a little disingenious to be rolling up the cost of an iPhone contract and presenting it as some kind of unique form of extortion imported direct from Cupertino.
Couple of points
"£1000 for an iPhone?!?!?!?!?!?"
As others have said, that's a very simplistic (and very Sun-like) way of looking at it. For that £1000, you're not just buying an iPhone and that's it, you're actually getting an iPhone, and a shitload of calltime and a shitload of texts, and "unlimited" internet usage.
My second issue is actually with O2 - I got my iPhone 3G when it first came out, and that was £35 for 18 months, and £99 down. That's a total of £730. And if the article is to be believed (ie. it's now free if you sign up to *2 years* at £35 per month) the total cost over that time is £840 - in other words, the price hasn't come down, it's gone up.
@Oh, come on! Use your brains.
my thoughts exactly,
if you were able to search pervious posts made here then you;d see that i'm not the greatest iphone lover, in fact I've said many time how crap I think the device is.
but for all of that money you;re getting a lot more than just a shiny new phone.
the plan I'm on, I pay £35 a month, (and gave my upgrade phone to a friend as I was happy with the one I had after taking out my original contract).
I'm happy to pay £35 a month for what I use, and find that fair. certainly when I used PAYG I was using a lot more money each month, and when I'd got a cheaper contract that didn't have as much included goodies I'd frequently exceed my limits and end up paying more.
so what we really have here is (for my example at least) and extra £10 per month, for a nice phone, or £180, and to be fair, that's still cheaper than buying one on ebay.
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