Markus

Have a read of this. Note that it is for the 3G and NOT the 3GS, though that could possibly change.

scoobyboy

excellent news! my contract ends with orange next week and i was going to go to o2 but now i might wait and see what happens

boxst

My wife uses her 3G iPhone on T-Mobile and it works very well (unlocked of course), so it will be good if they become an official carrier. I wonder if that means you can unlock the phone legally?

Steve

ScoobyDoo555

Still no news on Vodafone then.....

Been looking at the HTC Magic. Got one for Wifey. Bit buggy at times (still a new OS), but on the whole, very good

not an iphone though....

Need to move on something soon, my N95 is starting to struggle with phone calls

Dan

Markus

It will be interesting to see if they will let you take a 3G from O2 to the other networks. My guess is that you'll take the phone in and they will simply give you one of thier sim cards, which will obviously be locked to their network. I wonder of they will be offering PAYG with this as well

jowl

This is great news.

I'm with O2 but feel they have ripped off customers with the tethering and are ripping off new customers with poor contracts and pricing.

I'll probably hang fire and see what the next iPhone brings....but If I can PAYG or month to month contract with T-Mobile/O2 and get a decent deal, I'll go for it.

Competition can only be a good thing

Markus

Rogers is being sneaky. At present tethering is free, the data usage some out of your data plan bucket. However, this is only until, I think December 31st, at which point something will happen. I've got my first Rogers bill since getting the phone and there is a "tethering" option listed in the billing section, currently priced at $0.00, which is partly due to them saying it's free and partly due to me not using the feature.

They say this trial is to see how users use tethering. Nah, it's to see if it's popular and if so we'll charge a monthly fee for it, and if it's not, we'll charge on a usage basis.

I await the cries of horror after the deadline has past and people get their bills and Rogers has shuffled some change through to the tethering billing under the carpet and not properly informed customers and they find they are charged their usual horrendous overage rates.

I agree competition is a good thing, shame there isn't, at present, any competition to Rogers/Fido here. Bell and Telus are CDMA and not GSM. If they were GSM I'd have been very interested to see what kind of smart phone plans were offered with them, as I'm pretty sure they'd be clued up enough to know people would want to shift away from Rogers.

If Apple is allowing this for the UK, it will be interesting to see what happens in the US. There has been talk of Verizon courting Apple, and T-Mobile as well I believe, so it could be Apple does the same in the US, which would cheer up at lot of people who cannot/do not want to use AT&T.

Personally I think they should have been ahead of the curve and offered a carrier locked phone with AT&T for a subsidized price (which is what they are doing) and then offer a much higher priced unlocked phone for people to use on any network of their choice. If you want unlocked you pay a hefty price, thus offsetting the losses AT&T would make on not having exclusivity.

TonyBurns

iTrader: (3)

Welcome to Apple dictating pricing, IF t mob and orange get the Iphone (which is doubtful tbh) they too will be subject to said pricing and you will have to pay the same tarrifs/handset prices

Tony

PS, to those who have unlocked iphones on different networks, you wont have full access/capabilities of the phone as there is a little more to it that just running on a network (ie equipment).

jowl

You think this is an Apple thing? I'm not so sure. Why would Apple want to limit you to 500 texts in your bundle per month (I use less than that so it's not an issue for me personally)

Supercue

iTrader: (1)

I thought the Apple Tax was part of the branding

I had these same issues with my N95 when it was unlocked from Vodafone

I've just bought a Nokia 5800 to keep me going till this pans out further. If anyone is interested in a mint Samsung Omnia i900 pm me as it will be going on Flea Bay within the next couple of days.

Ideally I would like an iPhone but not on O2 thats for sure

Markus

The only things I can think of that would fall into this category would be Visual Voicemail, MMS and Tethering. It makes sense these might not be accessible as they do require something from the network, but it's not the iPhone's fault that they don't work however.

ScoobyDoo555

Surely Apple don't dictate the price per month. That's down to the Service Provider.
Once Apple get their price per unit, they're happy.

It's the service provider that then dictates how much you will pay for the service and associated options.

Otherwise, Apple and the other phone manufacturers would set up their own phone networks....

Unless anybody can confirm otherwise....

Dan