Much fuss ensued after the surprise price drop of the iPhone two months after its launch in the US; a move which resulted in a lot of disgruntled early adopters. A similar iPhone price drop just happened in the UK last week, making it cheaper to buy an iPhone than an iPod Touch over there. All this is probably not that surprising, given the imminent arrival of a 3G iPhone in June, and some interesting rumours about other new features. As a result, the same backlash has not happened as did in the US a few months ago, and recent purchasers have been offered £100 vouchers for the Apple store. This may be just a stock-clearance exercise by the retailers, but at £169, buying an iPhone in the UK suddenly looks, well, affordable!

So what is O2 Ireland’s answer to this? Well, er, nothing really. Still €399. Still not fully featured. Still stupid price plans.

And what’s Vodafone’s answer? The Nokia N95 for €169. Similar features and more, including 3G, GPS, and arguably, a better system for navigating lots of numbers (the scrolling thru your phonebook looks cool on an iPhone, but it is very impractical in reality).

The suits at O2 Ireland are confusing the dedicated with the stupid, making it impossible for even die-hard Apple fans to buy the iPhone here. O2, you are failing this very cool and fashionable product. Time to wake up. Seriously.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 17 0417400000030UTC48 ppm4830 10 174 3010UTC pm and is filed under Macintosh, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.