Hi,
Recently I bought two smart phones. An iphone 3gs for my wife on a iphone40 plan and a nexus one for myself.
The iphone came with 250 megs of data per month but as part of a promotion got 3 gigs per month I think.
The nexus came with nothing obviously as had to import it from the states. It is then that I realised just how shocking the plans are in NZ and there was little to choose from. I came to this forum and see a big article about how lucky we are blah blah.. but are we really?
Let us look at the price for data.. 100 megs what they call broadband light.. for 10 dollars..
that is 100 megs a month.. not per day... :) yes a whole month..
Now the nexus one which runs android which is written by google has the idea that everything should be stored on the net... so it loves to chew through data.. it syncs with picasa web albums grabs stuff for its map apps, navigation etc etc, everything is streamed.. in about 20 minutes of turning the phone when i first got it, it had chewed through about 20 megs of data.. 1/5th of my monthly allowance..
These phones are only going to get more and more popular, android has doubled its market share in the last 3 months and is expected to rise rapidly with verizon & motorolla about to start pumping out android sets. Most big carriers overseas have massive data plans or unlimited data plans which cost only about 30-35 usd from the people i have talked to.
At the moment Im scared to take my phone out of wifi range, I dont care paying for data but the prices seem extreme compared to overseas and vodafone nz seem really behind in international pricing and also the way the world is going (cloud). More and more apps are being written to store data not on the phone but on the net and 100 megs can be gone in a matter of minutes but yet vodafone nz would have us thinking 100 megs for a month is some sort of plan... (come on.. wake up, smell the cloud)
So... anyone have any inside information, are things going to change here? are plans going to become a little more realistic? or are we stuck with this cause of our population and only 2 real carriers?
place your bets.. and comments..