The iPhone Price Drop is Not A 3G Sign
by Ewan Spence
The sky is falling the sky is falling, there must be a 3G iPhone around the corner all the tea leaves and chicken [little] entrails say so!
Yes there is more furor around certain dedicated parts of the internet in regards to an update to the iPhone line, especially with the ‘why wasn’t it there in the first place’ 3G connectivity (to which I suspect the answer is a mix of cost, high power consumption, and Apple’s relative inexperience in the mobile market place). And driving that discussion over the last few days has been the drop in price of some one hundred pounds ($195 US) by UK carrier O2 on the 8GB iPhone – bringing it to a respectable (but still overpriced) 169 pounds
Yes I said overpriced, but let me refine that. It’s over-priced for the UK market, where you can pick up the high end Nokia Nseries devices for under 50 pounds in many cases. As we’ve said time and again, the nature of the market in different territories can affect a device and how it is received. The US finally had a phone with a good set of features for the tech crowd, and they loved it.
Please don’t read too much into a price cut of a company that has likely got excess stock on a unit. If there was some devious plot to clear the shelves, don’t you think that the 16GB unit would also have a price cut? Or that the cut would also be given to O2 customers in Ireland?
I’ve no doubt there will be a 3G iPhone in the near future, but Apple are traditionally very good at keeping things quiet, especially when there’s not been a squeak of an FCC filing for a 3G variant (which needs to be done some 90 days before a product release as I recall).
Apple fanboys, seeing patterns when there are none. Gotta love em.
