Yesterday at 10am, Vodafone New Zealand announce their plans for the new Apple iPhone they are releasing on the 11th of July. We had been waiting for weeks to get this information and a couple of days before launch, they finally gave it to us. I can see why they waited till the last minute (look at what happened in Canada.) The prices are really expensive for the average mobile user and New Zealanders were not pleased at all with what Vodafone had to offer.

At 10am, on the dot, the Vodafone New Zealand site was hit by many users that wanted to see the plan. But to everyones surprise, the site went down immediately due to the huge amount of traffic. You would think Vodafone would have foreseen this happening and done something to prevent it, but no, they were pretty useless so we had to get the information from other sources until the Vodafone site was back up, which was over an hour later.

Anyway, the price of the iPhone plans start at $80 and go right up to $250 with 1GB of data. This is insane. From the tables below, you can see the full details of the plans as well as the total cost of ownership over the 2 year contract period. The most expensive plan costs $6000 over 2 years. You also have to option to get the phone by itself for $1100 to use on a YouChoose plan.

The plans are pathetic and the prices of them are outrageous, especially when compared to the rest of the world. Vodafone New Zealand is doing the exact same thing Rogers in Canada are doing, taking advantage of the monopoly. In saying that, New Zealands mobile costs are expensive, even before the iPhone, so when you look at it like that and compare the iPhone plans to the current plans, you get a reasonable deal, in New Zealand.

I hope something happens soon to lower mobile prices in New Zealand, not just for the iPhone, but in general. This will probably never happen, especially since there is only one GSM carrier and two in total. With little competition, there is no reason, or incentive to lower prices. I wanted to get an iPhone from Vodafone, but it doesn’t look like I will be able to. I will still get an iPhone somehow, sometime soon, you mark my words!

Two weeks ago, during exam week, my sister got a phone call while she was at school. This phone call was from MTV and they called her to confirm her address so they could send her the prize she had won. The prize, it was a Samsung SGH-E250V phone. The next morning, there was a package on our doorstep. It was the phone. My sister had already gone for her exam and wouldn’t be home till later on in the afternoon so I wouldn’t get to see it till then.

When she did get home, she quickly opened it and there is was, a little red box with a cellphone in it. I quickly got the camera and asked her if I could unbox it and take pictures of it. She said it would be okay. I did that and then we put the phone on the charger and left it overnight. Just by looking at it, and reading the instruction manual (who reads instructions anymore) we worked out that her current LG phone is a lot better than the new Samsung, so she would let me use it till I got a real (i)Phone.

I turned it in and had a good 10 minute play with it. It doesn’t have 3G but it has a music player, bluetooth, FM radio, camera that can record video, and the other basics that a phone has. Now I needed a SIM card so I could take the phone. My sister went on for another exam that day and got me one while she was in town. Now I could actually use the phone.

Its a decent phone, I’m pretty happy with it. One of the things I have never had a good chance to play with is Bluetooth. Sending files to and from a computer using Bluetooth is amazing. Its quite quick and pretty easy to do, and the best thing about it, no wires! There is also an issue that I have with the phone. Since is it a slide phone, to access the numberpad, you need to slide the screen up. This is not a simple task, it doesn’t just glide up like the LG Chocolate, you really have to push it. On top of that, it is really hard to grip to slide it up. While this is not really a huge issue, it is really annoying, even more so if you really don’t want to touch the screen and get fingerprints on it.

Other that that minor problem, I am pretty happy with the phone. It is a temporary phone until I get my hands on a Jesus Phone, aka, the Apple iPhone. I can’t wait to be able to carry around one device, a cellphone, a music player, and an internet device. If there is a downside to this phone, and many other phones, its that I expect more from them, and they just don’t deliver like the iPhone Hopefully the temporary phone is very temporary!

This morning, at 5:00 am New Zealand time, the main event of the Worldwide Developers Conference took place. This is when Steve Jobs, Apple CEO presents his Keynote. I set my alarm for 4:00 am so I could get up and have plenty of time to do stuff before the keynote, but I ended up sleeping through it and getting up at 5:10 am. At this point, I quickly hopped out of bed to get my laptop and I brought it into bed with me and loaded up many sites so I could see the live happenings, with pictures, of the keynote event.

The whole internet knew what the main parts of the keynote were going to be about, the 3G iPhone, and 3rd Party Applications, as well as the possibility of OS X 10.6. And they were pretty much spot on. It started with a little bit about the next version of OS X but then they moved on and talked a lot about 3rd party applications coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch. At this stage, I was happy I didn’t get up earlier or else I would have been waiting a long time for nothing. I didn’t miss much and there was not much to it. Some developers showed off their apps and games that will be coming to the App Store when it launches.

Towards the end of the keynote, this is when the moment everyone was waiting for came, the announcement of the 3G iPhone. It is basically the same as the original iPhone. The new features are the 3G capabilities, GPS, plastic backing, flushed headphone jack, thinner edges and better battery life. And the price $199 and $299 USD for the 8 and 16 GB versions. This is with a 2-year contract with AT&T. The phone is going to be launching in 22 countries, including Australia and New Zealand on July 11th.

I want this device a lot! And after I watch the video version of the keynote, I am going to want to 100 times more. Reading about it and looking as some pictures of it makes me excited but hearing about it from the Steve Jobs and seeing it on video is going to increase the hype for me by an infinite amount. The only issue I had, was that I was not prepared to get this phone on a contract with Vodafone, but later on in a press release, they announced that it would be available on prepaid and contract plans.

Now this phone is going to be quite expensive in New Zealand. To get an idea of the price it will cost, double the US price and add about 25% on to it, which would make the iPhone cost probably around $500 to $650 NZD, and I assume that is with a 2 year contract with Vodafone. The prepaid version, I would say yu are looking about about $1,000 and $1,200. That is way too much! I am not willing to pay anywhere near that amount, especially for a cellphone I will hardly use as a cellphone.

Since that is the case, I would be better off with an iPod Touch. Although I would really love an iPhone because I don’t carry around a cellphone and an iPod + iPhone would be the idea device and pocket companion for me. At this stage, I would be happy to obtain a original iPhone. I don’t particularly need the 3G and GPS features so a simple iPhone would still be more than ideal for me. I might think about looking for a second hand iPhone but I still like the idea of having the iPhone 3G. We will see how this plays out.