Australian iPhone Pricing And Plans - One Day To Go
There is only one day to go for the release of the iPhone, so today I will devote some time to all the latest rumors and news for the Australian release of the iPhone as it comes in.
Each of the three Australian carriers has been playing cat and mouse with their respective plans and prices with both Optus and Vodafone having released details of their plans by yesterday.
Within hours of Vodafone releasing their plan details online yesterday, they took them back down again, while Telstra has remained completely tight lipped and released nothing.
The only carrier to release both their plans and pricing is Optus.
Here is a wrap of how things stand this morning.
Prices and Plans
With Telstra not having released their plan details at this stage, only Vodafone and Optus can be analysed here.
The best value prepaid plan is Optus’ $50 cap, which comes with 500MB of data per month, plus all Optus users receive free data for the month of July. It’s not all roses though, as call charges can be steep, with charges calculated per minute, not per 30 seconds, which can help to chew through your call times.
The Optus $59 postpaid cap plan may be a better choice. It offers the same 500MB of monthly data and you get the iPhone foe $2 for the 8GB model and $7 for the 16GB model over 24 months.
Vodafone has said it will have similar prepaid offers in the future, but not at time of launch. This is obviously what my friend at Vodafone was meaning on the weekend when he told me to hold off buying an iPhone for a couple of months.
All that is known of Telstra’s pricing at this stag, is that you can get an iPhone on a $30 plan for $279 for the 8GB model or $399 for the 16GB model on a 24-month contract with no extra monthly handset repayments.
Heavy Surfer
If, like me, you were hoping to get a good deal on a large data plan, you are fresh out of luck. None of the carriers is offering anything above 1GB per month.
Once again, Optus has the best value plan at this stage for 1GB of data, with it costing $99 on the postpaid plan and $100 on prepaid.
To get the same deal with Vodafone costs $169 per month.
Unlocking
iPhoneInAustralia.com is reporting that all Aussie iPhones come ‘bricked’ out of the box and that while you can buy them outright and activate on a store version of iTunes, it will lock it into the carriers sim in the phone. In other words, you will be locked into that carrier.
I am not sure if this means your phone would be locked into that carrier indefinitely, but if so, I would expect a fix for this, so should not really be an issue.
So there you have it. I’ll post more details as they come to hand.
Twitscoop Open To Gaming
I saw a couple of links to Twitscoop on FriendFeed earlier today and decided to take a look.
Twitscoop provides a tag cloud meme tracker and search functionality of Twitter activity.
The search works quite well, providing a graphical depiction of the frequency the selected term has been mentioned as well as providing a list of who and what was tweeted. You can are also able to select from 6 hours to 3 days for your search criteria.
As noted, Twitscoop includes a tag cloud on the landing page, which does what a tag cloud is meant to do, providing easily identifiable representation of the most frequently mentioned terms in tweets.
This is where the problem comes in. If you look at the top image again, you will see that the dominant tag there was for ‘thesagecommander‘. I had no idea what this was referring to, or why it should gain such prominence in tweets, so I clicked on the tag to see what it brought up.
Take a look at the image below and you will see just how this is open to gaming.
Because this user included the URL with each tweet, the domain name now became the most prominent tag in the tag cloud.
This should be fairly easy to rectify to prevent, but it does illustrate, the potential for gaming of the service
Apple Store Goes Offline
As noted earlier today, prices for the new MobileMe service were up this morning. Checking on the Apple store just now though, it seems the entire store has gone offline.
I checked both the US and Australian stores, so this would seem to signify a new product launch, whether this is the new App store, or something else remains to be seen.
MobileMe On Sale In Australia
You can now buy MobileMe service in Australia, so it is ready to roll (hopefully) when you get your brand new 3G iPhone on Friday.
MobileMe, the Internet service from Apple, automatically pushes new email, contacts, and calendar events to your Mac or PC and over the air to your iPhone and iPod touch. So no matter where you are, your devices are always up to date. You also get easy photo sharing, 20GB of online storage, and more.
Prices are $119 for a single user license and $179 for a family pack.
How Many Active Users Are On FriendFeed?
Yuval Atzmon has been conducting an interesting little bit of research on the number of active FriendFeed users. He began by writing his own FriendFeed crawler that starts with the public feed and extracts unique users.
The process is fairly straight forward, his crawler reads the feed, discovers the users, trawls through the subscribers and then repeats the entire process for the next user. From this, he extracts the number of active users.
Yuval provides disclaimers about his methodology, but his results are still interesting.He stopped his crawler at 60,000 users, finding that he was discovering less and less new new users at that stage. Allowing for the limitations of his methodology, and allowing 15% - 20% of undiscovered active users, he arrived at a figure of 75,000 active FriendFeed users.
I think it is fairly accurate to assume that the vast majority of these users would be early adopters, tech and new media oriented, make money online types with very few from the mainstream Web population.
Hopefully this will change in the future and provide a more diverse user base.
FriendFeed Gaming?
Interesting link on Twitter from Brian Clark, pointing to a post by Triston McIntyre about possible FriendFeed gaming.
Reading through the post, the title is a little misleading, as it mainly details how the top bloggers, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, and Loic Lemeur, are included as part of a nine-person default list of friends created by FriendFeed, partially resulting in a massive amount of followers for these four.
There doesn’t actually appear to be any gaming going on to me, more like a wise move by FriendFeed to leverage the profile of these four for their own benefit. Of course, this also has the benefit of increasing the already massive profile of each of the ‘magic four’, and conversely, increasing their Web traffic.
Personally, I don’t see this as a problem at all, I see it more as an advantage for new users who may not be familiar with the service, or the people on it; what better way to introduce them to quality conversation then with these four. I would expect this default list to change as FriendFeed gains more widespread acceptance and use beyond the early adopter, geek crowd. Once that happens though, we will probably see some genuine gaming of the service.
TweetDeck New Adobe Air App For Twitter With Search
I saw this link to a new Adobe Air Twitter app via Duncan Riley on FriendFeed.
TweetDeck is not just another Adobe Air app for Twitter; it actually adds some great features that can make your Twitter experience so much more enjoyable, especially if you are getting sick of the Fail Whale and receiving ‘limit exceeded’ messages in Twhirl.
Developed by Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck provides a move away from the chat style interfaces of typical Twitter Air apps, instead going for a larger screen footprint that allows you to see all tweets and replies at a glance, as well as the results of searches.
TweetDeck allows you to view four columns at once. These columns are:
- All Tweets - all your friends tweets.
- Replies - relies you have received.
- Search - fully integrates with Summize for all your searches.
- Group - the ability to group tweeters based on your own selections.
TweetDeck automatically updates as tweets and search results come in, but there doesn’t appear to be any way of forcing an update.
You can send your tweets from inside TweetDeck, as well as direct tweets and replies from the images of other tweeters. There also appears to be a button to favorite a tweet, but this was greyed out, so would seem to be non-functional at this stage.
I did notice an annoying little quirk, where clicking on some of the options for the first time, caused the window to jump to the left or right. This appears to only be an issue the first time the some buttons or options are clicked, subsequent clicks did not cause the same issue, except on the tweet text area, where clicking to close it caused the window to jump to the right, without the tweet areas closing until a second click on the cross.
Other then this little quirk, I am quite impressed with TweetDeck. If it had FriendFeed integration as well, it would be even better and maybe even become my app of choice.
TweetDeck is still beta software and I look forward to seeing what updates are included as development continues.
Australian To Wait For 16GB iPhone?
I was at a party last night and having a chat with a rep for one of the Australian mobile companies. Naturally, we were chatting about the upcoming release of the 3G iPhone, with me pumping him for all the information I could get.
As expected, I didn’t get too much out of him, other then that they will have them in the stores, ready to sell on July 11.
One interesting bit of information he did have though, was that there would only be the 8GB model on sale on July 11, with the 16GB not being available for another two months.
I haven’t heard this anywhere else, so cannot really say if it is factual or not. I would think not, but I will try and see if I can get confirmation anywhere else. If true, I don’t think this would be a supply issue at all, it could be a way of preventing getting topped by the other carriers plans. The company could be using it to release the smaller capacity iPhone, seeing what the plans are from the other carriers, then providing a far more competitive plan in two months time, with the larger capacity iPhone.
As the party finished and everyone went their separate ways, just before I left, he told me to hold off buying an iPhone for a couple of months.
Has anyone else heard rumors of this, or of better plans coming out a couple of months after the initial release?
SMSGupShup Gets $10 Million Funding
I recently reported on Indian startup SMSGupShup and how Twitter could learn a lot from the way they have built their architecture.
It seems that people were listening, with TechCrunch reporting that Webaroo Technology, the company behind SMSGupShup has raised $10 million in a third round of funding.
As previously mentioned, SMSGupShup shares many similarities in functionality with Twitter, but does not suffer the same outages, despite having 7 times the number of users and 3 times the number of daily messages.
As well as the different architecture, another reason for the increased reliability of SMSGupShup over Twitter could be the fact that most of the users are using only a mobile phone to interact with the service, whereas Twitter, due to it’s API, has numerous mobile and Web based sites and services linking to updates.
Optus iPhone Plans Revealed
With the complete lack of plan details coming from the three carriers in Australia I was starting to wonder if they were simply going to wait until the day of release before making an announcement, but it looks like it got the better of Optus, who has bitten the bullet and been first to make their iPhone plans public.
The data allowance is, as you’d expect from an Australian telco, pretty low; there is no unlimited, fair use plan, nor anything of any reasonable size that would be affordable for the average customer, however it is better then I expected.
I was speaking with Optus recently about their upcoming data plans and they were totally surprised when I informed them I was hoping for gigabytes data plans; apparently, they could not fathom why someone would like so much on a mobile phone.
What You Get.
Starting at the least expensive, $19 cap plan, you get $50 worth of calls and text combination, plus 100MB of data. This looks pretty good for someone who wont be using much data, but it comes with a 35 cent flagfall and 47 cents per 30 seconds call, which is ridiculous, unless you basically don’t plan on using your phone.
Taking the middle of the road $79 cap plan, you get the $550 worth of calls and text combination and 700MB of data.
The top level $179 cap plan gives you $1500 worth of calls and texts, and 1GB of data
Excess data is 35 cents per MB, but you do get the phone for free on a 24 month contract.
I am not sure what Telstra will be offering, but I expect Vodafone to come out with something much more generous with their offering.
