With the announcement of the iPhone's price plans today, I dusted off my calculator (widget) and worked out how much an iPhone would cost me over the length of my mandatory two year contract with AT&T. The result is that if you choose the cheaper iPhone and the cheapest price plan, I'd be looking at just under $81 a month. Put another way, it's a total of just under $2000 for the whole of the two years, assuming I don't go over the bundled minutes and SMS allowance in that plan.

Want a better value deal? The 8GB iPhone allied with the $99/month plan would cost me a rather terrifying $2999 over the course of the contract, a price so neat and tidy that you wonder if someone has done this calculation before me...



Transcribe those prices straight to pounds sterling, and the more expensive options works out at £62 a month, and even that price makes me wince a little. It's impossible to calculate how much the iPhone and its data plans will be when it's available here in the UK. Normally, figuring out the UK price involves doing a straight conversion (halve the dollar price), then replacing the dollar sign with a pound sign on the original price, and splitting the difference depending on the size and attitude of the company involved. With phones, it's a wholly different matter. The price of the phone is much more at the whim of the carriers – apparently driving a hard bargain here in Europe, much to nobody's surprise – and is entirely bound up in the nature of the price plans.

All AT&T's price plans in the States, for example, include unlimited data for email and web browsing; that could turn out not to be the case in the UK, which could in theory mean that the handset itself is cheaper. (Why? The iPhone encourages people to use data, either by making web/email easier and more pleasant than ever, through using Web 2.0 apps, or just by pinging weather and stocks services for updates. The data traffic, if billable, ensures revenue in the future for the carriers and so they can further subsidise the cost of the handset.)

All of this makes me much less decided about buying an iPhone. Nothing has changed with the device itself – it's still a superb piece of immaculately-executed technology, and the spell I fell under when I had it in my hands in San Fancisco in January hasn't broken – but the figure of three thousand dollars sounds a hell of a daunting. Are you tempted?


* UK prices converted using the exchange rate of 0.50014