Tomorrow, March 14th 2008, T-Mobile will start to sell the iPhone in Austria — exclusively. While exclusivity as such is not such a big issue, the price tags are just abnormally high. Abnormally high for the Austrian market, that is.
I don’t know about the U.S. market, maybe customers there are used to much higher prices, but Austria is a very, very low-cost mobile phone country. Carriers here have, over the last couple of years, driven the prices down to rock bottom, with some plans below 3 Euro Cents per call minute, and data plans of €20 flat for 6GB per month. For most phones, you pay nothing (or maybe a small amount), and in exchange you sign a 24-month contract.
And now comes the iPhone: €399 (8GB) and €499 (16GB), with €39 and €55 monthly plans, and a 24-month contract period.
I am an Apple fan, I own a MacBook Pro and an iPod Touch, and I think they’re great products. But sorry, Apple and T-Mobile, this is just ridiculous. Maybe the iPhone will change the Austrian mobile phone market, or maybe the market will change the iPhone. I hope for the latter, because I would really like to have one (with UMTS and integrated GPS, that is… if that ever arrives).
With prices like this, I’ll stick to my Nokia E61, thank you very much. My cost of switching is already quite high anyway (I’m using a lot of its features and have a lot of very useful software for it)…
