While browsing the AT&T website, I stumbled upon three additional iPhone rate plans that weren’t previously announced:
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While browsing the AT&T website, I stumbled upon three additional iPhone rate plans that weren’t previously announced:
AT&T and Apple announced three straightforward, reasonably-priced iPhone rate plans today.
All rate plans include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling.
Steve Jobs doesn’t play nice. Back in 2005, when asked about an iPod mobile phone, Jobs said Apple would have to get through many “orifices [i.e. cell phone service providers] to get to the end users.”
Well it seems Jobs has made it through these orifices, because not only did Apple establish a deal with Cingular (now AT&T) for the iPhone service, it managed to get around Cingular’s usual demands to control most of “every detail from processing power to the various features that come with the phone,” said the Wall Street Journal.
With the iPhone, Apple convinced Cingular that it knows Web surfing and multimedia better than they do. Apparently, this was important enough to Cingular that they agreed to give Apple a cut of the revenue generated from subscribers, even though they won’t get a penny from iPhone sales. Is that a price worth paying to be the exclusive carrier of the Apple iPhone?
Just about all of you who’ve commented on the Cingular iPhone ad are highly skeptical. I don’t blame you.
You guys are right: the design is completely unprofessional. The fonts are off, the spacing is awkward. Hell, the iPhone prices don’t even match the previously stated prices, (although I did post a few weeks ago about some analysts’ predictions that the iPhone prices would drop).
Nevertheless, the “ad” - or whatever you want to call it - was part of a Pinecone consumer research survey. My guess is that someone put this together quickly perhaps because the focus was supposed to be on the content rather than the design.
I showed Gizmodo’s Brian Lam the Cingular ad and he said that “the changes are what are critical” and that the research is most likely “standard marketing to check the results of the shifts in pricing.”
Anyway, I don’t ever expect to see this design out anywhere. But I’m really crossing my fingers that Cingular keeps those iPhone prices and rate plans. I’m sure some of it depends on the reactions they receive to the consumer surveys.
More on the Cingular ad:
Here are some screenshots of the iPhone consumer survey with the Cingular ad (prototype?). The address at the top was cut-off to protect the source. The number at the bottom of the survey is supposedly the Pinecone survey number.
Click the images to see larger versions:
More on the Cingular ad:
