iPhone on Telstra NextG Cap Plans – Why there is no customer loyalty

I bought the iPhone 3G in July 2008 on a 24 month contract with Telstra. At the time they refused to allow iPhone users to utilise their “Cap Plans”, and as such became the only carrier in Australia to offer iPhones without Cap plans. I signed up to the $80 per month “iPhone plan” and that includes $70 worth of calls.

As of June 26th 2009, the iPhone 3GS was released. Telstra now offer iPhones (the new or old model) on the original plans, but you can now sign up to the Cap plans. Comparing these plans at the $80 per month spend level shows:

Note: For data usage you need to pay an additional cost per month if you don’t want to incur AUD$2 per Megabyte of data. This is the same for iPhone or Cap plan, so I wont compare these in this post.

As can be seen from the above data, the original iPhone plan versus the NextG Cap plans now offered on the iPhone differ significantly. Discounting the flag-fall:

• With the iPhone plan you get 259 minutes of talking time, roughly 4.3 hours.
• With the Cap plan you get 608 minutes of talking time, roughly 10 hours. (Not including the extra $100 credit to Telstra Mobiles).

Hopefully you can see now why the Cap plans are better value. What does one do in this situation? One would think that you could call billing, change plans to a practically exactly the same priced plan – and change over.

With the hope of a changeover, I called billing. I wouldn’t mind taking the hit of having to sign up for 24 months again, and I learned that this would be required – BUT – and there is always a but with Telstra, this wasn’t all. If I wanted to change my iPhone plan to a Cap Plan I would have to agree to the following:

1. Sign up to the Next G cap plan for a full 24 months again
2. Pay out my current plan (in other words pay off the iPhone)

Paying off the current plan would cost me $850 upfront, or $70 per month for the next year.

Telstra – where is the incentive to keep customers. This is not a way to show it. Had you allowed a plan change to one now offered to newcomers to the iPhone on your network, I’d still be a paying customer for another 2 years (an additional year on top of my current obligation). Money grabbing to “pay out” my current plan and THEN signing up to a full new contract is a customer loyalty killer. Next G speed and coverage be damned.

Skype Update for iPhone – missing Push notification

An update for Skype on the iPhone has been released. Version 1.1 of the update offers some additional fixes and localisations, but the major addition is ability to send SMS.

This update is compatible with the iPhone 3.0 Firmware, so many people were hoping that Push notification would be included. It has not been, so the functionality of Skype on the iPhone is limited. Apple does not allow Applications to run in the background, so one can’t receive calls or message notifications in Skype without the app continuously running. The moment you jump out to the iPod, Contacts, Phone or any other part of your iPhone OS, Skype quits.

Without push notifications V1.1 of the Skype App for iPhone remains a novelty for Skype users, and only mildly useful for “away from the desktop” users who need to make a call over wifi.

Tweetdeck for iPhone is released

Tweetdeck, one of the better Twitter desktop clients, has now been release for the iPhone.

I used to use Tweetdeck, until Tweetie came out for the Mac (a native client). However on any other non-apple platform I recommend Tweetdeck or DestroyTwitter (both Adobe Air apps) to my friends.

In the last 24 hours Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, blogged about getting hold of the Tweetdeck beta. Since then the blogosphere has gone mad about it. Mashable reports that the app is now live in the Apple appstore.

You can get it for free from the App Store.

iPhone 3GS announced

The new iPhone 3GS was announced yesterday at WWDC. The main changes are in the hardware. The differences are now:

• 32GB Option
• 3 Megapixel camera with autofocus
• Video Recording capabilities with upload to Youtube function
• Voice Control
• Compass

The other new features coming to the iPhone such as:

• Cut, Copy & Paste (about time!)
• MMS and contact send/receive via SMS
• Bluetooth transfer and A2DP support
• Data tethering to your laptop (USB or Bluetooth)
• Spotlight Search
• Landscape keyboard across all apps
• Voice Memos

will be available on the current iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2G and included oin the new 3GS. A free software upgrade to Version 3.0 of the firmware will be ready for download to the public June the 17th.

For the die-hard Apple fanboys, a Quicktime stream of the keynote speech given by Phil Schiller is now online.

Wordpress 2.7 RC1 on iPhone

Now that I am using wordpress 2.7, I thought it would be good to test the iPhone app for wordpress. This is written on the app itself. I would say that although useful it seems to be more favorable to blog from a computer. The iPhone is suited to short spurts of typing, more on the realms of SMS or twitter.

The capability of quickly adding photos and the tag/category functionality seems full featured, as shown by a photo of my dinner I made from Cook with Jamie.

The app did crash when I tried to load this post from a local draft – it looks like the iPhone app needs a bit more work.

Blogging from the iPhone? 6 out of 10 points.