M1 and StarHub have officially announced the launch of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S. Sales will commence on Wednesday 9 December 2009. The prices of the phones as well as the specially priced phone subscription plans have also been announced. Prices are remarkably different from those of SingTel. There is also some differentiation between M1 and StarHub.

The iPhone 3G S 32GB will cost between $0 and $658 at M1, and between $0 and $668. The contract subscription plans range from $198 to $36 for M1, and $205 to $38 for StarHub. It looks like M1 edges out slightly. At the lowest price plan, M1 offers 10GB data, while StarHub offers only 1GB data.

Notably, the lowest price plan from M1 is itself quite attractive. There is no where you could get anything like it from other telcos, or even M1 themselves without also getting an iPhone to go along. It’s almost like the iPhone purchase would be subsidizing the subscription plan.

It looks like M1 is a winner with the latest iPhone offers.

I wonder if SingTel would be making adjustments to their prices. Anyone who would want to get an iPhone with SingTel would already have done so, so there might not be much incentive for SingTel to reduce their prices, except perhaps, to curb the success of M1’s and StarHub’s iPhone sales.

For consumers, it will be nice if all telcos make adjustments to their usual subscription. All of them make special voice+data bundles for iPhone. There is no reason to exclude other smartphone users from getting onto the same voice+data bundles.

Update (8 Dec 2009): It seems that SingTel has announced that they will also be revising their iFlexi plans.

Update (8 Dec 2009): It seems StarHub wants to do better. They’ve upgraded the 1GB bundled data in their lower priced plans to 12GB of bundled data, beating M1’s 10GB data bundle. Good competition. Let’s hope it spills over to non-iPhone plans too. I’m not going to keep updating this blog post about the latest developments…

Related posts:

1. SingTel Announces iPhone 3G Prices Hello, Singapore. SingTel has announced their iPhone 3G prices. You...
2. StarHub to Sell iPhones StarHub has announced that it will be starting to sell...
3. Singapore iPhone 3G S Prices Revealed Hello, Singapore iPhone fans. SingTel has decided the penance you...

StarHub has announced that it will be starting to sell the Apple iPhone later this year. M1 already earlier announced their deal to sell the Apple iPhone, also slated to commence by year end. These sales will break SingTel’s monopoly over the offering of these phones since 2008. Neither M1 nor StarHub has announced pricing of the phones and subscription plans. With the iPhone now generally available through any of the telcos in Singapore, we can imagine competition to heat up.

Related posts:

1. M1 to Sell iPhones Local telco M1 is set to become the second carrier...
2. M1 vs StarHub iPhone Competition M1 and StarHub have officially announced the launch of the...
3. 3G iPhone Selling Price in Singapore Even though the new 3G iPhone will sell for quite...

Verizon, a big telco in the US, has started a commercial and an ad campaign to attack the iPhone. It’s really hilarious. iDon’t have a real keyboard. iDon’t run simultaneous apps. iDon’t take night shots. iDon’t allow open development. iDon’t customize. iDon’t run widgets. iDon’t have interchangeable batteries. Everything iDon’t. DroidDoes. See the DroidDoes website, or the commercial on YouTube.

I’ve also been fond at mocking the iPhone. It has set a high standard for itself, but unfortunately, it’s features have fallen short of expectations. With the latest iPhone 3G S launched this year, I’d say the phone has made a lot of improvements. But so many others have also improved in the time it took the iPhone to get to where it is. I wonder where Apple will take the iPhone to next year.

If you ask me, I think the Motorola Droid looks like a good spec’ed phone.

Related posts:

1. The Most Spectacular iPhone Update With the just announced upcoming iPhone OS update, Apple’s iPhone...
2. The iPhone Software Worries Me I know nowadays phones are becoming like computers, which means...
3. 3G iPhone is Announced Apple has announced the much anticipated 3G iPhone at WWDC...

They’ve waited a long time. For iPhone customers on the AT&T network, finally, MMS has arrived. You’d have thought that the US would be more technologically advanced in these sort of things, but MMS has only just rolled out on 25 September 2009 for them. Yeah, all of us in the rest of the world… MMS is nothing new.

Related posts:

1. The Most Spectacular iPhone Update With the just announced upcoming iPhone OS update, Apple’s iPhone...
2. Why iPhone 3G Users Need The iPhone 3G S I heard that the iPhone 3G’s camera wasn’t all that...
3. SingTel Confirmed to Sell iPhone The news is out. SingTel will be selling the...

Hello, Singapore iPhone fans. SingTel has decided the penance you have to pay for your iPhone craze. It’s not cheap. Existing iPhone 3G users are being slapped a $600 or $300 upgrade fee for those who have completed 6 – 12 months or 12 – 21 months of their existing contract respectively. But there is good news for new iPhone 3G S wannabes. The new phones will cost slightly less than they did when the iPhone 3G was launched.

If you take up the iFlexi “Apple” plans, the 16GB iPhone 3G S will cost $60 less than the 8GB iPhone 3G did, and the 32GB iPhone 3G S will cost $70 less than the 16GB iPhone 3G did. Prices range from $0 to $678 for the 32GB iPhone 3G S, and $0 to $548 for the 16GB iPhone 3G S, depending on what price plans you pick.

But if you take up the usual SingTel subscription plans, the price points have remained the same, i.e., 16GB iPhone 3G S will cost what the 8GB iPhone 3G did, and the 32GB iPhone 3G S will cost what the 16GB iPhone 3G did. But there are more price points now, due to a greater variety of subscription plans. The 16GB iPhone 3G S will cost from $0 to $698 and the 32GB iPhone 3G S will cost from $0 to $848.

Head over to the SingTel Shop website to get the full details (I’m not posting the direct URL link since it will probably become invalid pretty soon).

I’m not much of an iPhone fan. But I’ll admit that specs-wise, the iPhone 3G S seems like a respectable phone. It is a bit pricey. The camera is not good enough for me. I’ll like to have a real keyboard too. Otherwise, the iPhone 3G S looks like a worthy consideration. (However, I’ve already decided to go with the Nokia N97. Check out my iPhone 3G S vs Nokia N97 comparison.) If you’re interested in the iPhone 3G S, SingTel will start selling them this Friday, 10 July 2009 at 8pm, at ComCentre (Exeter Road).

Related posts:

1. SingTel Announces iPhone 3G Prices Hello, Singapore. SingTel has announced their iPhone 3G prices. You...
2. M1 vs StarHub iPhone Competition M1 and StarHub have officially announced the launch of the...
3. iPhone 3G Non-Contract Price Revealed More information about the non-contract price of the iPhone 3G...

Perhaps you’ve already heard all about it. SingTel will start selling the iPhone 3G S in Singapore on 10 July 2009 (see SingTel Shop announcement). I think this iPhone 3G S will finally be what the iPhone is meant to be. It is two years late in coming, after the iPhone 3G launched in 2008 and the original iPhone in 2007. Ignore all the Apple marketing for a moment, the iPhone 3G S now finally has all the major features that everyone has come to expect of a smartphone. That’s great, but how does it stack up against other smartphones?

Other phone manufacturers did not sit still waiting for Apple to catch up. In the two years that Apple went from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3G S, many other new smartphones have come to market. For Nokia, one of the significant milestones is the introduction of their first touchscreen smartphone, the 5800 XpressMusic. The flagship N97 followed about a half year later. Both phones run the Symbian S60 5th Edition software platform.

How does the iPhone 3G S stack up against the N97?

Physical Form: The iPhone 3G S measures 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm, weighs 135 gm. The N97 measures 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm, weighs 150 gm. The N97 is slimmer, but taller and thicker, and a little heavier too. The N97 is inevitably thicker and heaver as it is a side-slider design and a real built-in QWERTY keyboard. The construction is surprisingly good and solid. The iPhone is a solid block. With nothing to slide or move, no (almost) buttons to push, you’d expect it to be solid.

Phone Connectivity: Both the iPhone 3G S and N97 have all the works. Quad-band GSM, tri-band UMTS. 900 MHz UTMS replaces the 850 MHz UMTS frequency for certain N97 markets. Both phones offer 802.11b/g WLAN. The iPhone 3G S sports Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, while the N97 supports only up to Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. Both phones support Assisted-GPS. I understand that the HSDPA function on the iPhone 3G S will support up to 7.2 Mbps download speed, which puts it ahead of the N97 which supports up to 3.6 Mbps only.

Other Sensors: Both phones feature accelerometers (orientation sensor), digital compass, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor.

User Interface: The iPhone 3G S is entirely dependent on the touchscreen interface, with virtual keypads and virtual keyboards. The user interface is quite smooth and fluid, but how good it may be, some people will find it easier to work with a real keys. The N97 is also touchscreen.

Camera Functions: The N97 wins with a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual-LED flash. The iPhone 3G S only has a 3 megapixel camera with no flash. Both phones support geo-tagging, and they both record video at VGA resolution with 30 fps. The iPhone 3G S lacks a secondary camera like the N97 to use for making video calls. I suppose video calls aren’t all that important anyway. To date, I’ve not made a video call other than for the sheer fun of seeing it work.

Battery Life: The iPhone 3G S boasts 12 hrs and 5 hrs of 2G and 3G talk times respectively, which is somewhat comparable to the N97’s 9.5 hrs and 6 hrs. In terms of standby time, the N97 wins at over 400 hrs compared with the iPhone 3G S’ 300 hrs. The N97’s video playback time is weak at 5.5 hrs compared with the iPhone 3G S’ 10 hrs, but it scores better with 40 hrs music playback compared to the other’s 30 hrs. I guess, in general, their battery performance can be said to be comparable.

Display: Both phones sport a 3.5″ display. The iPhone 3G S has a 480×320 resolution, which looses out to the N97’s 640×360 resolution. The iPHone 3G S uses a capacitive touchscreen which is more touch sensitive than the N97’s resistive touchscreen. But the N97’s resistive touchscreen technology enables you to use a stylus.

Under The Hood: Both phones have built-in 32GB of flash memory (the iPhone 3G S is also available in a smaller 16GB version). However, in most other techie data sheet specifications, the iPhone 3G S will win out: 256MB of RAM vs 128MB for the N97, 600 MHz ARM1176JZF CPU vs the 434 MHz ARM11 CPU (not sure how the CPU can be compared directly…).

The iPhone 3G S and N97 are somewhat comparable phones in overall features and capabilities. In fact, the N97 looks surprisingly like the iPhone 3G S too. The smooth, shiny surface, mostly occupied by its large display, looks quite similar to the iPhone 3G S from afar.

But the two phones are each different enough to cater to different target users. If camera photography is important to you, you will go for the N97’s better camera optics and flash light capability. No doubt the N97’s dual-LED flash is nothing spectacular compared with Xenon flashes on other camera phones, having a flash is always better than not having any at all. The higher resolution display is an advantage for viewing photos and videos.

I’ve not actually played with the iPhone 3G S, since it isn’t available yet in Singapore, but from my experience playing with the iPhone 3G, I’d say that the user interface is smooth, slick, and somewhat fun to use. The N97 interface will be familiar to any Symbian user, although it could be a little complicated to first time users.

As with all first release software, the N97’s software currently still has a few kinks that need sorting out. Hopefully we will be seeing a more responsive and stable software in future updates (which are always free). If you want the fun-ness of the Apple user experience, simple idiot-proof user interface, then go for the iPhone 3G S.

Related posts:

1. Apple iPhone vs Nokia N95 8GB Yes I know the Apple iPhone has hit the...
2. Nokia N95 8GB Still An Excellent Phone The N95 8GB was officially launched on 29 Aug 2007,...
3. The N97 – Nokia’s First Touchscreen Smartphone Nokia has unveiled details of its first touchscreen Nseries smartphone:...

I heard that the iPhone 3G’s camera wasn’t all that wonderful. But I never knew it was that bad. If you actually need to take pictures, the iPhone 3G’s camera is totally a joke. You really need the iPhone 3G S upgrade. Here’s some side-by-side photo comparisons taken with the 3G and 3G S by Guy Kawasaki, one of my favourite writers.

So I can understand if any iPhone 3G users feel the need to immediately upgrade to the iPhone 3G S. It’s a pity that with the 24-months contracts in Singapore, it will be an expensive upgrade.

There are also some side-by-side speed comparison to show how really slow the iPhone 3G has been, or to put it a better way, how much quicker the iPhone 3G S now is.

Sigh, all these reinforces my feeling that the original iPhone and iPhone 3G were launched too early. They were incomplete products being pushed out to market. But Apple has managed to sell incomplete products very well.

Related posts:

1. Singapore iPhone 3G S Prices Revealed Hello, Singapore iPhone fans. SingTel has decided the penance you...
2. iPhone 3G Launch In Singapore After much speculation over the last many months, it is...
3. iPhone 3G Has Arrived The iPhone 3G has been launched yesterday in 22 countries...

I cannot resist the opportunity to say something sarcastic about the iPhone. But I think Apple is asking for it. Their self-professed “most advanced mobile operating system” now has such wonderful features as Cut, Copy and Paste. Yah, this part just doesn’t sound right. One of the other “new features” includes MMS. Wow. This is 2009. Cut, Copy and Paste, as well as MMS, are still counted as new features in certain mobile operating systems.

This is one of those rather puzzling things, to me, about the iPhone. It does have many nice things. Sometimes it is understandable that as a product is pushed to market, some features are left out. Yeah, better to get into the market early with an incomplete product, than to wait until the product is completely finished and find an opportunity missed. But Cut, Copy and Paste is just one of those so simple and fundamental things that I cannot understand why it took the 3rd generation of the iPhone software to finally get things right.

But anyway, the iPhone has finally come of age. The latest product refresh is the iPhone 3G S, which includes a 3 megapixel autofocus camera. Yes, I know, 3 megapixel is not plenty of pixels in this age of camera phones. What remains to be seen is the quality of the photos produced by the 3 megapixel camera. The iPhone is all about lifestyle. It would be a pity if it did not excel in multimedia, in photo taking capabilities and video recording capabilities.

Related posts:

1. The Most Spectacular iPhone Update With the just announced upcoming iPhone OS update, Apple’s iPhone...
2. 3G iPhone is Announced Apple has announced the much anticipated 3G iPhone at WWDC...
3. Apple iPhone 3G S vs Nokia N97 Perhaps you’ve already heard all about it. SingTel will start...

With the just announced upcoming iPhone OS update, Apple’s iPhone can now finally do just about what other phones have been doing for years. I cannot resist dissing the iPhone, because I’m so amazed at how such a modern piece of technology can be missing such fundamental features that everyone just assumes is there in every phone. What are the new features in the new iPhone OS 3.0? Hold your breath…

The latest iPhone OS 3.0 has copy-and-paste! Yeah! After two major generations of software, the iPhone now has the amazing capability to select, cut, copy, and paste text! It’s one of those things that everyone has taken for granted. How in the world did Apple start selling a phone that is missing such a feature?

The next most amazing feature of the iPhone OS 3.0 is support for MMS. Yes, MMS, as in MultiMedia Messages. There is no other meaning to MMS. It’s the same MMS that other phones have supported for years. It’s just something that we all assume is there, and we are all shocked to learn that it isn’t. How in the world did a media-savvy device ever get launched without supporting MMS? This is almost unforgivable. It is like trying to sell a music player that cannot play MP3 files, or a camera phone that does not record video. Oh wait, the iPhone OS 3.0 still does not record video (or at least it’s not one of the touted new features of the OS). Okay I know, there are 3rd party applications, but still… the iPhone does not come with video recording features!

Is MMS important? Some of my friends/colleagues discussed and thought it wasn’t. It’s not the same as SMS. That’s true. We all use plenty of SMS. But many people avoid MMS because it costs a lot more than SMS. However, I do find myself sending a small number of MMSes from time to time. There are instances when a picture (or sound) is really what I need, when words just will not do.

Well, for the iPhone owners, you’ve finally gotten a modern phone on par with just about any other decent modern phone on the planet can do.

Update: Oh wait, I just got updated that the announcement was to talk about what the iPhone OS 3.0 will have, not that the iPhone OS 3.0 is already available. Not even that it will be available in the next few days. Apparently, iPhone users will have to wait till “summer”. Oh well, at least they have hope of getting their iPhone modernized to match the capabilities of other phones.

Related posts:

1. The iPhone Software Worries Me I know nowadays phones are becoming like computers, which means...
2. 3G iPhone is Announced Apple has announced the much anticipated 3G iPhone at WWDC...
3. The Most Advanced Mobile OS Can Cut, Copy and Paste I cannot resist the opportunity to say something sarcastic about...

More information about the non-contract price of the iPhone 3G has been revealed. Recall that I previously posted news about the non-contract iPhone 3G price from AT&T at US$599 and US$699 respectively for the 8GB and 16GB models. The new information comes from the online Apple Store itself, which gave prices for the non-contract and unlocked iPhone 3G. It seems to be slightly more expensive than AT&T’s, probably because AT&T’s iPhone 3G will still be locked to the carrier.

The new prices have been revealed in the Apple Store Hong Kong, which lists the 8GB and 16GB models of the non-contract and unlocked iPhone 3G at HK$5400 and HK$6200 respectively (S$991 and S$1137 respectively).

Just to recap a little. SingTel currently sells the iPhone 3G at S$698 and S$848 for the 8GB and 16GB versions with the lowest priced contract. So we can work out that the lowest priced contract fetches about a S$290 subsidy. I think they can do better. Let’s just see what happens when StarHub and MobileOne enters the market.

Aside: I have a Nokia N95 8GB, so I keep wanting to draw comparisons with it. The iPhone 3G costs more than the N95 8GB (which currently goes for about S$900 without contract).

One thing to note about the non-contract unlocked iPhone 3G from Apple Store Hong Kong. The online store warns that the phone’s warranty service is restricted to the country where it was originally sold. This means if you “parallel import” the iPhone 3G from Hong Kong, you don’t get warranty from Apple in Singapore.

Related posts:

1. Singapore iPhone 3G S Prices Revealed Hello, Singapore iPhone fans. SingTel has decided the penance you...
2. 3G iPhone Selling Price in Singapore Even though the new 3G iPhone will sell for quite...
3. M1 vs StarHub iPhone Competition M1 and StarHub have officially announced the launch of the...