Ever click on a mailto: link, only to scream in frustration as Apple Mail opens yet again?
Then check out Webmailer 1.0. I use Mail.app with Gmail on IMAP. Still, I suppose this is tremendously useful for those who don’t.
July 2008
iPhone to launch in Singapore on August 22nd?
Chief operating officer of Apple, Tim Cook, said at the Apple’s quarterly financial conference call:
Confident enough in production ramp, that will be launching 20 additional countries on August 22nd, bringing total to over 40, and still expect to be selling in over 70 countries by end of year.
SingTel Optus iPhone 3G plans and pricing
SingTel Optus, one of the three Australian telcos that will be offering the iPhone come July 11th, has revealed its pricing for post-paid and pre-paid plans.
The pricing details for the plans and iPhone do a great job of confusing everybody, but we can gather that the bundled data usage with the post-paid plans are anaemic, with the cheapest plan offering only 100MB of data transfer with either 53 minutes of talk time or 200 SMS for S$25. Even the most expensive plans, which go for S$195 and S$234, offer only a maximum of 1GB of data usage.
But the anaemic data plans should be viewed together with what Optus was offering before the iPhone plans came out—and they were equally, if not more so: 10MB, 30MB and 200MB of data usage plans for S$6.50, S$13 and S$19.50 respectively. Comparatively, S$22.42 buys you virtually unlimited data usage (50GB) on SingTel. Thus we should be able to expect much more data bundled with our iPhone plans when SingTel announces its plans later.
Strangely the cost of the iPhone is not stated in full anywhere on Optus’s website, but as monthly repayment options over the period of one or two years. Longer contracts and more expensive plans give you more subsidy on the iPhone itself.
At its most expensive, the 8GB iPhone will cost S$800 for one year of the S$25-per-month contract; signing up for two years of the same contract will bring to price down to S$659. With the next cheapest plan at S$64 per month, the 8GB iPhone will cost S$580 and S$220 for one and two-years of contract respectively.
Hong Kong’s iPhone pricing
The 8GB iPhone to be sold by Hong Kong’s telco, 3, will range from free to S$513 depending on the plan you sign up for. The 16GB iPhone will go for S$24 to S$653. Comparatively a HTC Touch Cruise offered by the same network goes for S$765 with a 18-month contract, while the Nokia N95 goes for S$852.
Plans for the iPhone start from S$33 to S$57 for 500MB of data and varying amounts of talk time, or S$87 for unlimited data transfer. The network currently charges—without any voice plan—S$17 to S$50 for 500MB of data transfer and S$85 (or S$57 if you’re their broadband user) for unlimited data usage.
Here at SingTel, both the HTC Touch Cruise and Nokia N95 goes for S$698 with the 2 years of iOne Plus plan (S$25.68 per month, no data usage bundled). If the Hong Kong plans and pricing are anything to go by, we should be seeing an affordable iPhone with good voice-and-data plans over here.
It should however be noted that the plans announced by the Hong Kong telco seems to be the cheapest so far, when compared with AT&T in the United States (starts at S$95, unlimited data usage, at least 450 minutes talk time, no free SMS bundled) and Rogers in Canada (starts at S$82 for 400MB of data transfer, 150 minutes of talk time and 75 SMS).