Since June 11, the hype surrounding the new 3G IPhone has slowly grown to mega proportions worldwide as people got excited about its release, announced to hit stores July 11. With less than a week to go until its release, i felt it was time i added my two cents on the matter.

Here in little old New Zealand, so far from the global conglomerates and large corporations and their headquarters, we were all excited to hear that we would be one of the first countries to receive a piece of the IPhone pie. And so vodafone NZ put there hands up and said “we will give the people what they want” and signed on to be the NZ provider for the IPhone. Telecom decided to stay out and have said nothing as to weather or not they will join the party, except to say they will have a 3G-capable network up and running in November this year. Does this mean that we might see Telecom supporting IPhones in the not too distant future? Only time will tell as we all get caught up in this hype for a phone that is so much more. As of today vodafone have not released their pricing details in NZ or Australia, but they have said that no pre-paid service will be available for New Zealand, while Vodafone Australia will. I for one see this as a small hurdle, where I am sure someone will have the sense to buy them in Australia and go ahead and sell them in New Zealand contract free anyway, so Vodafone NZ will just be leaving the waters open for that sort of thing to happen.

No Pre-paid means that all phones will be sold with a fixed term contract with a monthly fee, which could be anywhere from $25 a month to $100 a month, boosting the actual price paid for the phone much higher then the alternative of buying a pre-paid version, as some countries are doing. But this will come down to how much you really want the phone and are willing to pay for it. I for one only use my current 3 year old mobile for texting, spending little over $10 a month on a pre-paid system, with few if any phone calls. to jump to the iphone and being stuck paying more then twice as much a month, and likely being stuck will less usage then i currently get, would not be the most intelligent thing to do, but of course this could almost make the overall cost of the IPhone come to about the same over the contract period as would buying it at its full cost, which i estimate to be about $750-$850 for the 8GB, and $850-$1000 for the 16GB. This equivelency will ultimately depend of the plans that are available and how much use i actually get out of it.

So there goes my two cents on the IPhone. After getting my hands on a hacked original IPhone i am convinced it is the must have gadget, if only to combine the carrying of a phone, mp3/video player and portable wifi browser into one convient easy to use device. But as always money rules, and we will wait and see if the options available are financially viable.