Waiting for a “Virgin” iPhone before taking the plunge?

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt]

If you’ve been hoping that Virgin Mobile would soon sell the iPhone, partially because it’s owned by Optus, and partially because it has cheap data rates, rumours suggest it could soon happen.

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Been waiting to pop your cherry and commit to an iPhone, but didn’t necessarily like the plans or data charges on offer?

Then Optus subsidiary Virgin Mobile might come to the rescue with an iPhone 3G connected to some of its existing plans, which include being able to get 300MB of data for AUD $10, and 1GB of data for AUD $15.

Of course, until Virgin Mobile makes the announcement, the facts are that it’s all speculation, no matter how strong the rumours reported by ZDNet Australia, its sister site CNET and users of those sites forums.

Given that Optus sells the iPhone and owns Virgin, you’d think that Virgin would have a pretty good chance of slipping between the sheets to join Apple, Telstra, Vodafone and Optus for some of its own iPhone action.

It’d be quite a fivesome... although if truth be told, I’d much prefer to see six players in action, as it’s just not the same without 3 Mobile and its own brand of pricing party tricks to make things a lot more interesting for consumers who like the watch, call and surf on their iPhones.

So, if you haven’t yet decided to dump the iPhone chastity belt because you want to see how the pricing plans evolve or if other plays join the game, the move from Virgin mobile could well be the one to catch your attention and get you to say “I do” to a post-paid or pre-paid Virgin Mobile iPhone plan.

But should you buy an iPhone 3G now, if you haven’t already, or just wait further?



Article Link at http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19684/1103/

[Brendan]

Yeah I'm waiting for a updated Iphone 3g to come out.
don't want to invest that sort of money and be ina contract as
a better version comes out.

but as for Virgin data.. Becarful!
sure is cheep $10 for 500Mg and $15 for a Gig i think,
but once you go over that its 1.5c per Kb.
think about it, thats $15 a MB.

Good luck to anyone who strays over the limit is all i can say.

[Alex Zaharov-Reutt]

Hi Brendan,

It's $10 for 300MB as it says in the article.

But yes, $15 per meg. Multiply that by 1024 to get 1GB, and you're looking at lovely not-so-little bill of $15,360!

I forgot to mention that. One heck of a cherry-popping price to pay!!

If Virgin (and Optus) were going to realistic about it they'd just charge you another $15 for the next gigabyte, and $15 thereafter.

Anything more than that is highway robbery, pure and simple...

Cheers

Alex.

[james]

Hi, don't be fooled by Virgin Mobile's value for money pricing!

I was on this for 2-3 months, and I got fed up with their network problems. And I'm not the only one, see this whirlpool thread I have participated in:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-re ... ?t=1004833

The internet connection was never reliable, always getting timeouts, and gateway errors. It worked, maybe 2 minutes at a time, but never actually worked long enough so you would be able to do something useful.

Also after contacting Virgin Mobile representatives, I received the stock standard, "No, nothing wrong on our end, contact the support team to fix up your settings".

It was working a month a go with the same settings, why am I the one that's caused these problems all of a sudden? And why is it happening to an increasing number of customers as well?

Bad form Virgin Mobile. A 3G connection that works only sometimes, is pretty much a connection that doesn't work at all.