Macintosh

iPhone 4 Pay As You Go vs Contracts

June 17th 2010, 08:06pm

Obviously I need the new iPhone.  Need one, d’you hear? But where previously the pay as you go deal, though an upfront expense, has been great value for me (as someone who never uses the phone to call) things have changed.  Previously the upfront price from O2 included 12 months of unlimited data which could then be bought for £10 a month (and a £15 a month top up paid for that, £5 of calls, and snagged 100 minutes and 100 texts into the bargain).

This evening I’ve been doing some calculations which I will share in case any of you are in the same situation: namely, you hardly ever call or text (75 minutes and 100 texts would be more than ample).  I’ve looked at 02, Orange and Vodaphone. (I wanted to include Orange PAYG prices, but I couldn’t find any info on data costs with this. And I’m assuming O2 have got their 18 month and 24 month handset costs back to front.)  I’m also working on the basis I’ll keep the phone for 2 years, so it would be worth getting locked into a 24 month deal for cheaper monthly costs.  All costs are calculated over 24 months.

O2 Pay and Go

£599 for the handset (unlocked from Apple), £240 for 24 months of calls (£10 worth, 40 – 188 mins depending on call patterns), texts (300) and data (500Mb). No lock in. Total £839.

O2 Simplicity

£599 for the handset (unlocked from Apple), £360 for 24 months of calls (300 minutes), texts (unlimited) and data (500Mb). 12 month lock in. Total £959.

O2 Pay Monthly

£299 for the handset, £600 for 24 months of calls (100 minutes), texts (unlimited) and data (500Mb). 24 month lock in. Total £899.

Orange Pay Monthly

£269 for the handset, £720 for 24 months of calls (150 minutes), texts (250) and data (750Mb). Total £989.

Vodaphone Pay Monthly

£309 for the handset, £600 for 24 months of calls (75 minutes), texts (250) and data (1Gb). 24 month lock in.  Total £909.

Tesco Pay and Go

£569 for the handset, £240 for 24 months of calls and texts (for say 30 minutes and 40 texts), data (1Gb). Total £809.

Tesco Pay Monthly

£429 for the handset, £240 for the first 12 months of calls (250 minutes), texts (ulmited) and data (1Gb), then 12 months PAYG with any provider, say £120 for O2 as above. 12 month lock in. Total £789.

Tesco monthly would be a great deal if (a) they had any stock in and (b) I wasn’t getting a discount on my broadband with O2.  So would their PAYG, if I really didn’t make many calls.

It looks like O2 Pay and Go may still suit me best so long as my calling requirements remain modest… But there’s not so much in it now.

Updated 18th June: corrected with official Vodafone pricing, which makes the handset £29 dearer.

Updated 20th August: Tesco pricing.

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Macintosh

More iPhone Death: Drowning

June 3rd 2010, 07:06pm

Musselwick - 1There could be lots of reasons why I didn’t blog my previous iPhone going in the sea.  It could be that there’s not much to say about it (“don’t put your iPhone in the sea” is hardly new information), it could be that in the western wilderness of Pembrokeshire my only tool for blogging was waterlogged.   But really it’s the pain.  They say the pain fades: it still feels pretty raw to me.  It feels cruel to be reminded.

For the record: we went to a beach where you can only get to the sand at low tide, and it wasn’t quite low tide.  We had a 2 year old and a 5 year old with us, we decided to wade round and I volunteered to carry the latter (you can already guess what’s coming).  I stepped into the water and discovered that the edge of the small wave concealed an extremely large rockpool.  Which was very well hidden.  Yes.

Me, nephew and phone all went in the water.  Me cursed, nephew cried, and iPhone didn’t make any noise at all.  Ever again.  (After a couple of hours on the beach the tide had come back up to the point where we’d need to wade again: nephew declared that he wanted me to carry him.  Slow learner…)

There are stories on the internet of iPhones that have gone into washing machines, toilets and worse and made it out.  I put mine in a box of rice (no silica for miles out there) for several days, and changed the rice very day.  Maybe it’s the salt?  When I got it home I took it to the Apple store where it was officially pronounced dead, and replaced for £120.  Which, incidentally, was just slightly less than what I would have paid in premiums if I had taken out an insurance policy.

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Macintosh

Slow Death of an iPhone

June 2nd 2010, 09:06pm

This is my premature “coroner’s report” on my 3G (white 1Gb) iPhone.  I’m really posting this for anyone else who is having problems with their WiFi.  For information, rather than hope, that is.

My unit, 10 months (but not under warranty because it was a replacement for one that went in the sea) gradually stopped connecting to WiFi networks and then even detecting them.  Now an Apple Genius has confirmed the hardware is defective.  The unusual thing was there were no other problems with the phone, and there have been no error messages.  I’ve now just switched the WiFi off, although that means I won’t be able to use some apps (like remote) or surf fast at home and at work.

I now expect the rest of the phone’s functions to gradually deteriorate until it no longer rings or lets me dial numbers containing a 6.   I should be furious, but secretly I’m pleased to have the perfect excuse to buy (with money I don’t have) the next generation phone, the one I always wanted, that is going to be announced next week.

You are going to announce it, aren’t you, Steve?

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Technology

If Music Be… An All You Can Eat Buffet, Play On

June 1st 2010, 10:06pm

A music download or streaming subscription can give you access to unlimited tunes, but you can never listen to them all and the minute you cancel your subscription they’re gone, so why would you bother?

I used to go into curry houses which offered all you can eat buffets determined to get better value than I’d have had ordering dishes from the menu.  You practically had to winch me out of my chair at the end; I would roll down the street to the nearest bus stop.  Now I prefer buffets even when I serve myself less food than I’d have had from a couple of dishes from the menu because I get to taste lots and eat exactly as much as I like of each dish.  If you try to quantify each transaction the outcome may seem to favour ordering from the menu, but I find a buffet a more enjoyable experience.

My post a couple of days ago about Spotify and iTunes focused on how Spotify has crept onto iTunes’ turf. But the discussion focussed on subscription versus purchasing music, and clarified my thoughts on this. I think Spotify has made it impossible for iTunes to resist branching into subscriptions, and I think the reason why people like subscriptions comes down to two things:

  1. Given that we like to experiment and listen to new music, if the cost of a subscription is less than what we spend on trying out new tracks that ultimately aren’t really “keepers” then a subscription represents good value.
  2. Having a subscription changes the rules.  We no longer have to weigh up whether we think a track is going to be worth buying to listen to it in full.  Subscription listening is about discover and casual listening, and we’ll still buy the tracks we really love.

The former argument is a simple quantifiable choice.  We can research the costs and determine the best value.  But it’s this second argument, about the quality of the experience, that I think will have persuaded Apple.  In their negotiations with mobile providers, they were, after all, insistent on having a special iPhone tariff offered with unlimited data, so iPhone users wouldn’t have to worry about whether they’d already downloaded too much.  They wanted the iPhone experience to be simple, fun, and free from boundaries.  Now they’re the dominant player in music, it’s the newcomers that are making the running, but if Apple doesn’t keep up, then they’ll be the one limiting the music experience.

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Technology

Spotify Can Do What iTunes Can’t

May 30th 2010, 11:05am

Apple have shied away from subscription and streaming for a long time, but Spotify have copied all the best bits of iTunes so it now offers better iPhone syncing than the Apple product.  Will iTunes now copy the best bits of Spotify?  It’s a sibling rivalry – the digital music equivalent of the brothers Milliband…

Subscription services have come and gone as Apple’s iTunes has gone from strength to strength.  But Spotify have developed a compelling service copying iTunes in providing a simple and intuitive client and a very comprehensive music catalogue – and to cap it all, offering it all in a free (advertising supported) option too.  In the “next generation” Spotify service, two major features were added: social and local.

The former is essentially integration with Facebook which pulls in your current friends (if they’ve linked Spotify to their accounts too) and offers familiar features such as feeds and recommendations.  It’s simple, but not only is it more sophisticated than Apple’s limited Facebook/Twitter recommendations options in the iTMS, it has far higher utility because if you have Spotify already you can listen to the full tracks and playlists your friends are subscribing to and recommending with no purchase and no risk (for example, if you’ve got Spotify you could listen to my playlist of commercial tracks from Doctor Who or House, M.D.).  If iTunes wants to get more social, it’s going to be hard to resist the subscription model for much longer.

But the feature that must really have made Apple sit up and take notice is the local feature, the effect of which is to make possible wireless syncing of your iTunes library to iPhone.  This is because Spotify brings in all of your local tracks, and if you have the mobile app (I don’t yet, because I haven’t bothered to sign up for the premium subscription) when you’re on the same wifi network you can make a playlist containing your local tracks (or a mixture of local and Spotify tracks) available for off-line listening. Presto!

Spotify is almost ready to persuade me to give up iTunes altogether.  But there are a few things it lacks (smart playlists, podcasts and audiobooks) and sadly the wifi syncing feature that’s available on the phone isn’t available to other computers on the network (i.e. local files on one network machine cannot be streamed to others).  So Apple has an opportunity here to make a comeback, and here are the three things I want from the next generation iTunes:

  • Streaming/subscription service with social features
  • Let me access music on any of my computers registered to iTunes from anywhere, including streaming it to my iPhone
  • Let me wirelessly sync files to my iPhone for offline listening

And if anyone will (finally) offer me the facility to annotate playlists, I’ll be ecstatic!

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