August 7, 2008

iPhone gets (officially) dated in the Philippines; Price outrage

So I accidentally pushed enter when Mozilla Firefox's Awesome Bar led me to Globe instead of GameSpot, and when the page loaded while I was typing the correct address, I saw in the headlines of a portion of the site that they have officially dated the authorized release of the iPhone 3G in the Philippines. Fellow Filipino geeks, mark your calendars for 22 is the magic number- August 22.

Globe announces in their article that they will have a specialized plan just for the iPhone 3G, ranging from offering free Wi-Fi and mobile internet browsing hours to the offers that exist today. The details are really, really shocking, but you can reserve your unit now.

But I assume you didn't click on the link found in "really, really shocking", so I'll let you see what's so shocking about it.

I assumed back then that you can get the phone for free at plan 800 when you convert 199 USD to peso, but I was DEAD wrong. I mean, of course, a high-end phone without MMS and video recording should be free (but only the 8GB model, not the 16GB) at Plan 5000 although it comes bundled with unlimited WiZ (Globe's Wi-Fi service) hours and many free texts, voice minutes, and mobile internet.

And if you're on prepaid, your luck has run out. You know why? It is pricey. It's like you can buy something more feature-packed like, I don't know, a video camera? Oh wait, how about a MacBook or almost any laptop for that matter? A phone isn't worth this much, not even Sony Ericsson can match the price of this (I heretofore regard as) pile of $hit. Why? It almost costs an iPod shuffle covered in real gold; it costs 41,889 pesos for 8GB and 48,899 pesos for 16GB. But I think it's open to any network.
 
You'd get a LOT MORE value with an illegal/jailbroken iPhone 3G that's been hanging around since its release. Better yet, you can go to America and take a chance on unlocking it in Greenhills.

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