iPhone 3G: The price you pay for high tech

In case you missed it, it’s official.

What I find amusing, at least for the people who read my post about it two months back, is that they seem so surprised about the pricing scheme.

Like I said in the past post, the $200 price tag was baloney – and when you do the math with the new data, you’ll be paying about a thousand dollars for a plan-free unit. It’s interesting though that the two plans discussed in the past are almost right on the money – and the plan will eat you alive in 2 years.

But the question really is if a $1k plan-free unit is preposterous or not?

Yes it is unreasonably expensive. I could definitely appreciate it being cheaper, especially if I have my 1st gen working almost the same way at Php14k. But seriously, a $1,000 price tag, while unfortunate, is not ridiculous.

Think about this: any full-fledged PDA ¹ Personal Digital Assistant easily reaches that price point. Both XDAs I’ve owned (XDA2 and XDA Atom life) costed more than that. It was easy to slam on the iPhone before because it didn’t have the same hardware and software value/potential offered by the PocketPCs or Blackberries during the day. But that’s all changed now.

With the AppStore, it has already matched, and could possibly even surpass your Symbians, PocketPCs, or PalmOSes. With the 3G and GPS, any advantage these other competitors had have diminished significantly – if not vanished entirely. And if your carrier implements their back-end services properly, you can even give the BlackBerry market a run for its money.

The iPhone has now become a true PDA/mobile productivity device. In fact, as much as I hate to make sweeping generalizations in technology; as of this very moment, I can say the iPhone is the ultimate mobile device – and you won’t hear me say those words often.

Given those facts, it would be understandable for free-market forces to price it just like the previous high-end PDAs. Sucks for the consumers, but that’s just the way the ball rolls.

If you want to drive the price down, then don’t buy the phone – and the market forces will hopefully push the price down – but guess what, it’s not happening in the US, Europe, etc. and knowing how Filipinos love to get themselves in debt in uber high service plans for a new phone (regardless if they can use it or not), so I doubt that will happen here anytime soon either.

I’m actually considering the plan 800 at 25k – since 25k for an iPhone is cheap, and I’ve never used any carrier other than Globe (and I my average billing is thereabouts), but my 1st gen is working just fine. ² GPS in the Philippines I doubt would be any good if it even comes to fruition, and I never use a mobile data plan (GPRS, EDGE) by the sheer cost of the rates. So the ONLY thing left that appeals to me is the fact that it’s 3G – which means it will also work on UMTS networks (e.g. Japan, et all) Still, I find the fact that the new iPhone will work absolutely anywhere in the world (including Japan) very appealing ³ In fact, that was the reason I got the XDA Atom Life before.

For the techie naysayers, here’s what I have to say: For all it’s worth, despite the price… if you have actually used the phone like I did, and exploited its potential, you’ll realize that it’s well worth the cash.

If you don’t believe me, get an iPod Touch, then load it with applications in the AppStore (assuming they’re productivity apps) – you’ll see how useful the device can get as a PDA… then imagine integrating a phone that will work everywhere into it.