Use an iPhone in New Zealand
I don’t have an iPhone (yet).
I wish I did :)
When I do, you can bet I’ll be heading to KIWI-ISE, a collection of tricks and mods to make your iPhone more “Kiwified”.
There doesn’t seem to be any official way to get an iPhone in New Zealand yet, but it’s been confirmed that Vodafone will be selling it. Timing hasn’t been announced though, and with the imminent release of the iPhone 2 / 3G, I bet it won’t happen before the second half of the year.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Howzit DY,
What I’m reading down there mirrors one of the major dilemmas up here in the Czech lands. We’ve got too many technified units — with over 2/3rds of a phone’s functions unusable by the vast majority of the population — because the providers don’t offer the service.
Ditto for the iPhone — even though the German operator — here called “T-Mobile” — will apparently be supplying the service. We initially thought Vodafone would be offering it as in NZ, but no dice. By the way — we have three providers — O2 (Spanish), T-Mobile (German), and Vodafone (British).
The ads they’ve been emblazoning around the city (Prague) have been suggestive, which is indicative, I imagine, of a large push to come down the pike very soon.
When will NZ know?
–Adam Daniel Mezei
Prague, Czech Republic
adamdanielmezeis last blog post..Amazing Splendid Thoughts — May 26, 2008 — Prague’s Downtown Creeps Up On You
May 27th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Hey Adam :)
I’m not sure when NZ will officially know.. not before the 3G iPhone is released, I’m sure…
However, mobile internet data usage here is sooo expensive, that I doubt it will be enticing to use all the internet-connected goodness outside of a available wireless LAN anyway :(
D
May 27th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Nice to hear back from you, D.
I recall from my time down in Aotearoa how expensive mobile was — bizzare, too, as no single person I spoke to when I was there a couple of years back seemed to know the definitive answer as to why. I’m going to posit a couple of possible rationales, though:
1) New Zealand doesn’t have a large enough population critical mass to ensure a swift capital payoff or technology rollout for certain novel, bleeding-edge, technologies. Meaning, where NZ wins on the consumer trial basis — due to its smaller size and willingness of its tech-savvy population to sample new things — it conversely loses on the hardcore capital outlays of a very expensive kind that can’t be recouped in a timely fashion — ergo, it falls on the end-users’ shoulders to defray.
2) SIM card penetration rates aren’t as high in NZ as in the EU nor in North America (don’t know what the present kiwi SIM-card stats are off-hand, though) and so the price remains unjustifiably higher because the capital outlay can’t be paid off fast enough.
The latter option is pure economics — the “ins and outs” of the money supply, as it were.
Onto something here, or something’s fishy?
adamdanielmezeis last blog post..Amazing Splendid Thoughts — May 27, 2008 — Ike Pigott of Occam’s Razr