Ireland & Austria: iPhone on Sale, Data Oh, Cap!
The iPhone has now successfully stormed the mobile markets of both the Emerald Isle and the birthplace of the Oak. For those keeping track at home, this brings the official score card to:
| Europe | North Am. | South Am | Asia | Africa | Oceania | Antarctica |
| 5 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
(Not counting the massive gray market, 'natch).
What makes the two newest iPhone launches unique, however, is that while hardware pricing is consistent with other EU countries, it looks like Austrians won't be loving them some unlimited data any time soon, with T-Mobile caps firmly in place at 3GB. Of course, they're still better off than their O2 bedeviled Irish launch-mates, who not only get even less data at a miserly 1GB, but also don't get Visual Voicemail! (We should point out that, according to Apple Insider, use of Visual Voicemail in Austria will also count towards your 3GB of data!)
So are these capped data plans the future of iPhone? Are the European EDGE networks so obsoleted by 3G that they can't handle more or is Apple being forced to concede on their data demands to get their units into more and more territories?
And now that 5 and 6 are settled, who's in the running for 7? Apple COO Tim Cook did promise us Asia this year, which makes Japan (who knows about China?) a possibility. What about Australia? Scandinavia? Are we betting on Antarctica before data-gouged Canada? (I am!)
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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I've always wondered..whats the international norm for cell phone plans? Meaning, what do the foreign carriers usually offer? (data? text? unlimited n&w?) They sure seem to pay a lot for so little--or it seems like it?
Don't even get me started on Canada. Up until very recently, we could get 100MB for the very reasonable sum of $100-$200.
Now it's come down (how couldn't it!) but it's so complicated and crazy that it's almost impossible to figure out. Some offer unlimited but email only on certain phones only (like only 1 model of blackberry, nothing else), others offer unlimited browsing but only on feature phones using their walled-garden browser on non-unlocked phones.
It's literally stupefying.
And the telcos don't really care because they think 100 business crackberry's at $100 a month is better than 100,000 consumers (mobile accomplishers?) at $20.