Why #O2Fail is really ‘iPhone customer Fail’

Written on 9th June 2009                                                                                                              47 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester

So, the new iPhone 3G S has been announced and Apple fans are keenly expecting to upgrade upon its release on the 19th of June. Keen, that is, until they find out the cost of upgrading.

In the UK, O2 is telling iPhone customers that they’ll need to buy out of their existing contract before signing up on a new deal for the 3G S. For customers who bought an iPhone 3G on release day last year with 7 months left on their 18 month contract, that’s at least £245 (if you’re on the cheapest monthly price) that you’ll have to pay before signing up for a new contract and maybe paying towards your new phone too.

Last year, there was none of this. Existing iPhone users could upgrade to the 3G version without having to buy out of their existing contract, simply signing up for a new one. It’s understandable that these people were assuming that they could simply do the same this time.

Now they’ve found out they can’t there’s a bubble of anger building. The hashtag #O2Fail is trending highly on Twitter this morning and a petition has been launched asking for “A reasonable way to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS”.

Unfortunately, these people are missing a pretty obvious fact. The original iPhone wasn’t subsidised; you had to pay full price for it. The 3G, on the other hand was subsidised heavily by O2 meaning that part of the money you pay to them monthly covers the price of the handset.

This is how it usually works in the UK. You can pick up a top-of-the-range Nokia for free because you pay for it monthly in your contract. If you want to upgrade early you have to buy your way out of the contract because you committed to it.

Whether it’s a fair system or not, that’s the way it works. Apple fans had it good last year, but O2 doesn’t owe them anything. There’s no way they could take the hit of writing off all the money they spent on iPhone 3G handsets last year just to satisfy their customers’ gearlust. The iPhone offers the best user experience of any phone on the market but that doesn’t make it immune from economic realities.

Tech humour site TechChuff has the right idea. Their alternative petition hits the nail on the head.

Apple, fail, iphone, O2, phones

47 Comments »

Chinese Mobile Innovation

Written on 13th April 2009                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Pieter-Paul,

This afternoon a package from Shenzhen that me and my colleagues have impatiently been waiting for was finally delivered. It was a Razor phone, ordered on Taobao, China’s eBay. No, China is not behind, nor were we interested in buying an outdated mobile device, on the contrary: the Chinese Razor phone – with David Beckham as its unofficial ambassador -  has just been launched and is cutting edge, literally. The Cool758 Razor as the phone is called, is the first phone that has an actual working electric razor function build in! Apart from this great tool to cope with the 5 o’clock shade while hardly hearing the person you are calling, it also offers, among others:  a 2 megapixel camera (which you can use while shaving), a 2.6 inch touch screen, dual SIM card, a shaver cleaning brush, and it supports T-Flash cards of up to 8GB. (more…)

china, gadgets, phones, Razr, Taobao, trend

2 Comments »

Modu: phone morphing might burn millions of Dov Moran’s dollars

Written on 24th March 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Our Next Web Tipr in Israel, Yaniv Solnik, is a great guy. He sends us many tips and is generally very nice. Today however, he seems a bit angry. He’s talking about an Israeli company that is ‘bound to crash big time and make many investors loose their money’. What’s going on here?

Yaniv discusses Modu, a very ambitious venture that has developed a mobile phone that consists of one smart CPU and many totally different and good-looking covers – or jackets. So these three different-looking phones have the same CPU with all their personal and mobile info stored on it:

It’s an idea of the well known and successful entrepreneur Dov Moran. Before Modu, he was the founder, Chairman and CEO of msystems. A company that invented USB Flash Drive and FlashDisk amongst other things. From scratch, Moran build a 1 billion dollar company in 18 years. It was acquired by Sandisk for 1.6 billion dollars. So to say the least, Moran has an impressive track record.

That probably helped when he was looking for some funding. So far he has received investment funding from SanDisk, Genesis Capital, and Gemini Capital Fund Management totaling 20 million dollars. Moran hopes to secure another $100 million this year and he probably will. He’ll start selling his product in October with three service providers in Russia, Italy and Israel.

So the investors really fancy his phone-morphing idea. It doesn’t really surprise me, since it’s a trendy product that looks astonishing. And of course, the business model is also pretty simple: Moran expects consumers to keep buying new jackets. Yet isn’t the product launch five years too late? The mobile world is raving about new smart phones, the iPhone and the all-in-one Nokia N95. Why would people walk around with these little and cheap devices?

Dov Moran

Moreover, according to my loyal WebTipr, this is not the first time that an Israeli company is trying to pull this kind of mobile centric device. “A quick look at IXI Mobile, another Israeli venture that burned millions trying to do the exact same thing with a bluetooth centric device, gave up long time ago and is now focusing on a ’smartphone for kids’ named Ogo.”

While we are being very negative here, Mr. Moran himself thinks he’s working on a revolution. “It’s not like the top five companies where everybody makes devices similar to the others, we’re going to change the cellular market,” he said to Reuters. Guess I would say the same thing when I was in it for 5 million dollars.

[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]

design, dov moran, mobile, modu, phones

2 Comments »