T-Mobile slashes price of 8GB iPhone
04 April 2008
T-Mobile slashes price of 8GB iPhone
German wireless carrier T-Mobile has slashed the price of the Apple iPhone, fuelling further speculation that a 3G version of the iconic device is in the works.
From Monday, April 7, German consumers will be able to able to pick up the original 8GB version of the device for as little as Eur99, if they take it with the XL size package, which comes in at Eur89 per month for 24 months.
For those taking the cheapest S package, which costs Eur29 per month, the hardware costs Eur249.
Even so, that's a good bit cheaper than the Eur399 it previously sold for. The newer 16GB version still retails for Eur499 however.
But the price cut has been enough to set tongues wagging about the impending launch of a 3G device. The word in the US is that existing iPhone supplies are drying up as AT&T looks to shift its inventory to make way for the new unit, and T-Mobile's move seems in line with this strategy.
Then again, T-Mobile could just be looking to shift some units. It emerged in January that German sales figures for the iPhone came in weaker than both France and the UK, amid concerns that the Apple brand isn't strong enough outside of North America to compete with the big names in the handset space.
Michael Kovacocy, European telecoms analyst at Daiwa SMBC, told telecoms.com that T-Mobile may have cut the iPhone price simply because of insufficient demand and the need to offer handset subsidies to move product. Kovacocy adds that 3G will be a definite improvement to the device, and agrees that it is destined to arrive in the not too distant future. "The key is giving a better value proposition to customers used to 3G as a minimum - 2.5G is justtoo hard a sell," he said.
What could be described as harder evidence of the existence of a 3G iPhone also turned up late last month when Japan's biggest intercom maker, Aiphone, revealed that it has been in discussions with Apple since last summer and has recently come to a friendly agreement that will allow the Californian gadget vendor to use its beloved "iPhone" brand in Japan.
It turns out Aiphone owns the trademark to the "Aiphone" brand in Japan and about 70 other countries. But while "Aiphone" and "iPhone" are spelt differently in English, the phonetic similarities apparently give Aiphone the company the rights to the "iPhone" trademark in Japan.
Regardless, it's probably a safe assumption that Apple wouldn't go to all this trouble if it wasn't going to launch the iPhone in Japan. And given the technological landscape of the country - NTT DoCoMo and Softbank on WCDMA and KDDI on 1x EV-DO - it seems clear that a WCDMA iPhone is in the works.
One thing's for sure, Steve Jobs has worked his magic yet again and it looks like the Apple Developers Conference in June will be another iPhone bonanza, after all the final version of the 2.0 software is already penned in for release at that event, so why not have new hardware to go with it.
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