The Firehouse

If anyone knows exactly what the “network settings” are, feel free to comment. This was pushed to my iPhone by iTunes a few minutes ago, without further explanation.

I have been reviewing Telefonica Movistar’s iPhone page, where they list the various pricing plans available. The short version: cheapest iPhone you can own, having to stick to a two-year commitment is 845 Euros, if you switch to Movistar from another mobile operator, such as Orange or Vodafone. This is the 8GB version, with a base price of 299 Euros, and a monthly minimum bill of 24 Euros. If you opt for the 16GB version and the most expensive plan, which will set you back a whooping 115 Euros a month, you can have the iPhone for zero Euros…but you will have paid 2.760 Euros after two years!!!

There is no word on the legal terms regarding contract switching, so it’s unclear if once you pick a plan, you have to stick with it for the two years. Both data plans feature unlimited data on both the 2G/3G network, and Telefonica’s WiFi hotspots, but the cheaper plans drop in speed once you have used 200MB of data, versus 1GB for the most expensive versions.

What is very interesting to compare is the percentage difference in purchase price versus the total cost of ownership (TCO). The cheapest 16GB iPhone is 20% more expensive to purchase than the 8GB version, but at the end of the contract, it has only been 7% more expensive to purchase. It’s even more shocking that the 16GB iPhone purchase price for the third cheapest voice+data plan (55 Euro/month) is 122% more expensive, but the TCO difference is only 4.4%!

The bottom line of all this is – buy the 16GB version, you’re only paying at most 7% more, and you can fit twice as many songs and movies. For those of you wanting to pore over the charts, here they are:

My headline was going to be ‘completely fucks up’, but it seemed a bit too harsh for a title. The current timeline for the launch train wreck of the iPhone 3G in Barcelona has been:

10:20am: Visited El Corte Ingles, one of Movistar’s major distributors. They have received exactly zero iPhones. The queue is thus of exactly zero people.

10:25am: Passed this queue in Telefonica’s main Barcelona store, in the centric Plaça Catalunya:

I decided to skip this and go to the second main Movistar store in Barcelona.

10:32am: Arrived to the queue, much shorter this time, in the Ronda de Sant Pere store. People leaving the store with a very pissed off look, saying things like “and they didn’t see this coming?”.

10:35am: Confirmation that they had a total of seven (yes, 7) iPhones shipped to them, and they have all been sold. The queue is to sign up to a waiting list, WTF!!!

10:36am: I leave the store, and call one of Barcelona’s main Apple distributors, who was on the official retailers list that would have iPhones.

10:37am: The first time I get a 302 redirect over the phone. They confirm that they will receive one iPhone for display purposes today, but they have put up a website one can use to sign up…for a waiting list.

11:15am: Telefonica PR is saying that they could not have anticipated this level of public response, and are overwhelmed.

Now…they have been hyping July 11th for months now, and even setup a site one could sign up to be sent iPhone news – which by July 6th had over 140.000 signups! This is total incompetence, however you may want to make it look.

I visited this page which lets people give their details to Telefonica Movistar, and supposedly be sent information about the upcoming July 11th iPhone 3G release in Spain, for which they have exclusivity with Apple.

It seems that in earlier versions of this page, as iPhone Alley shows, Movistar showed a counter with the number of people that had submitted their details, but this counter is now gone. Worry not, however, as if you access this URL: http://www.iphone.movistar.es/cuenta_reg.php – it returns the number of signups to date. In the space of time it took to write this, the number went up by almost 30, standing at 141.723. Not bad, I guess the queues will be long at Telefonica stores this Friday!