Dave Thorp's Blog

Mere hours after I posted blasting the networks for the lack of information on the UK pricing for the iPhone 4 a little snippet of information has come to light. Not from the networks who are still remaining deathly silent as the game of chicken continues into a 3rd day but from an anonymous tipster e-mailing pocket lint. Now for reasons that will become clear in this post I am taking this information with an extremely large pinch of salt as I cannot believe O2 would demonstrate such stupidity as to offer an early upgrade offer that isn’t actually an offer (again as you will see later in this post)

The rumoured £20 per month remaining of contract to upgrade looks good on paper sure. Most iPhone customers are on tariffs ranging from £25 to £75 per month so this is great no? NO it’s not great!!!

Most iPhone customers probably believe the iPhone tariffs are the full range of tariffs available to them. They aren’t. I changed 2 months ago from an iPhone tariff over to the standard set of tariffs as I was starting to use my iPhone sim in a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. And being on the standard tariffs makes me aware of two more additional tariffs below the £25 level priced at £15 and £10.

So I will be on the £25 a month tariff with 12 months left to run when the iPhone 4 comes out. So assuming this taken with a pinch of salt report is correct upgrading to the iPhone 4 using the early upgrade offer will cost me £240.

Alternatively I can either try and get an additional contract or if that fails I’ll have to wait 2 months, downgrade to £15 and then to £10 a month and then pay off my contract. That will cost me £25 for the first month, £15 for the second and then £10 months at £10 which is a total of £140 saving £100.

If the report does turn out to be accurate and that really is the O2 upgrade “offer” I’d strongly suggest people take a good hard look at it and work out if it will be significantly less expensive to do it another way

EDIT – The details are now up on the O2 website regarding the early upgrade offer and as feared its the fantastic £20 a month offer that works out more expensive than dropping down to the lowest tariff and then buying out the remaining months of the contract. Nice one O2

So some 36 hours ago the new iPhone 4 got announced by Apple’s Steve Jobs and became the first truly worthwhile thing Apple have announced this year that isn’t just four existing products stuck together with cellotape! Plus the good news that the UK would be receiving the device at launch.

Since the announcement, what have the UK mobile networks done and what information have they released to their (potential) customers? Well the answer to that is not much. Each network have come out and said they will be selling it (in the order O2, Vodafone, Orange and new to the iPhone T-Mobile). O2 have also come out and said existing customers would be able to upgrade onto it but provided no solid details on if that is all existing customers, selected existing customers, a few customers drawn out of a hat or what.

Go onto most of the mobile phone network websites and you’ll find naff all actual information apart from harvesting e-mail addresses with the promise of being the first to find out. But the information we need such as cost and details of O2′s early upgrade scheme are nowhere to be seen. And it’s starting to thoroughly pee me and some other people off. It’s not like this has come as a surprise to the networks, they must have known about the impending announcement probably long before anyone else did. So all the information their customers need should have been ready to go the second Steve Jobs stopped talking.

If you look on the twitter feeds for some of the UK networks HERE and HERE its just full of people asking the same question that should have been answered on Monday night “how much will it cost” or in O2′s case “will I be able to upgrade and how much will it cost” and its getting ridiculous. The only reason I can think of why not one of the networks has come forward and revealed their pricing is they don’t want to be first and risk the other 3 undercutting them. Now that is fair enough but they need to realise that keeping their current and potential customers in the dark is going to thoroughly pee them off possibly to the point where they will just go to the first network to announce the prices even if the others are slightly cheaper.

Last year O2 made a right mess of the 3GS launch by refusing to listen to their customers and not allowing any kind of upgrade path without paying unlawful penalty charges, buying the device at full cost on PAYG or taking out additional contracts. This was responsible for the #o2fail tag to appear on twitter and it has had one or two mentions again this year as has my hashtag #tellushowmuchnow (which hasn’t taken off as yet).  This year 4 networks are bustling for our custom but are making an even bigger pigs ear of things by keeping (potential) customers in the dark and not giving people the information they need. Who knows, perhaps by the time iPhone 5 is announced we might know how much iPhone 4 is going to cost!

When the 3GS was first announced, I asked the question was it worth the hype? At that time of course as it wasn’t released, I didn’t have my hands on one. Now I do! So how does it compare to the 3G and is it worth people upgrading? This post will discuss this, as well as be a review of the handset

Appearence

The 3GS appears more or less identical to the 3G. Well in my case that isn’t entirely true as my 3GS has double the capacity of my 3G so has a different number on the back and is a different colour as I opted for the white version this time.

I did expect the white version to be white all over and not just on the back cover. The area surrounding the screen is still black so unless you look at it from behind there is no noticeable difference.

People seem to be raving about the new charger and rightly so as the charger changes from a bulky affair to one that is smaller than a standard electrical plug.

Interface

As is commonly known the new phone is little different in terms of usability from the old 3G with the new 3.0OS. However there is a noticeable speed difference when using the phone and navigating menus and the like.

New features

The much talked about compass seems to do exactly what it says on the tin and integrates with maps nicely. I am slightly concerned however that maps seems to try and determine my location from my home wifi network when at home and wifi is turned on (presumably as GPS always did suffer indoors). This has the nice side effect of banging me two miles to the west and near to PNE football ground rather then where I actually live.

The voice control feature sounds nice but can’t say I’ve tried it yet.

*goes to try it*

Well it seems to do alright. Probably about a 90% hit ratio with what I asked it to do. Would be nice to have the option to play a specific song rather than a playlist, album or artist though. Perhaps in OS 3.1

The camera autofocus seems to work well. I can’t say I’ve noticed much difference in picture quality though. I have not as yet tried the video camera.

I am yet to use MMS on the 3GS as I never was a big picture message user unless they were free and I used them instead of texts (last time that happened was with imode handsets). However as the 3GS’s MMS support is the same as the 3G’s but with video added I’m guessing it will be fine

I have not even attempted to use tethering. People seem to be very put off at O2′s pricing even though and O2 wont even permit its use without buying a bolt on though there is a hack to get round this. O2′s pricing on tethering seems to be on a par with their mobile broadband pricing though and as I already have mobile broadband I cant see me using this much.

So is it worth it?

The extra speed alone probably does make this a worthy upgrade. Voice control is useful though I would like to see the accuracy pick up slightly and additional control options.

However, my original opinion stands, it is not worth people paying silly money to buy the handset on PAYG or even worse buy out their contracts. Thankfully I managed to work round both those problems and went for neither option. The 3G does much that the 3GS does equally well or not much worse. Unless you must have the latest phone or really need the speed boost, voice control, video and a compass you should probably hang fire. The 3GS is an excellent device though, however many people feel that this is what the 3G should have been first time around.

Apple have apparently reported that sales of the 3GS over the first weekend were in the region of 1 million units worldwide. Not sure how that compared with the 3G though an accurate comparison is impossible as many 3G owners were unable to upgrade this time, and stock levels for the 3GS seemed to be higher than they were for the 3G. Not to mention all the technical issues that plagued launch day on the 3G were avoided this time round