By Grace Chng
Senior Correspondent
chngkeg@sph.com.sg

 

FANS will get their hands on the next gen iPhone 3G S (S for speed) this coming Friday when SingTel starts selling it in Singapore.

Peek at SingTel’s website on Monday morning to find out how much you’ve to shell out for the fancy cool phone.

Before I share my views on pricing, let’s find out what has happened since SingTel started selling Apple’s cool phone on August 22 last year. Prior to the launch, tens of thousands of people signed up on SingTel’s website to book the phone and SingTel planned an elaborate event which included fireworks to welcome the iPhone to Singapore.

Fans queued around ComCentre, SingTel’s headquarters near Orchard Road, some for as long as 24 hours before the first customer got his hands on the iPhone just after midnight on August 22. They paid anything from about $0 to over $800, depending on their data usage and calling habits.

Yet after being in the market for less than a year, people are again excited by the prospects of a new iPhone.

Discarding the fan boys who will buy anything that comes out from the California-based Apple, the excitement is in the improved hardware and significant new software features.

It’s common knowledge now that the new iPhone can cut-and-paste, forward messages and send MMS (multimedia messaging) which are common features on other phone brands.

Existing iPhone users who have upgraded to the 3.0 operating system software in the last two weeks would have found that they could do this, plus search their entire phone contents and view anything in landscape mode from SMS to web pages.

However, it’s only with the hardware that you get two significant features. The 3 megapixel camera is miserly and is still way behind what other phone makers are offering.

But the focus feature gets my top marks. A blue square focuses on the centre of the image when you camera is switched on. Move the square to another spot on the screen and it focuses there. The camera does the rest and you get sharp images

Capturing video clips, I believed, has always been a pain. Not the actual shooting but the hours of editing that has to go with it when you only want a 5-minute clip. The iPhone’s on-screen editing makes this a snap.

Once you’ve shot what you want, you can playback the video clips. A toolbar appears at the top of the iPhone screen. Tap on where you want the clip to start and tap again on where you want to end.

Then select: Post to YouTube, send it as an e-mail or save it as a file. Voila! It’s that simple.

For these reasons, people are excited about the new gizmo. SingTel is planning another big event – maybe with fireworks again – as tens of thousands have again signed up on SingTel’s website to book or ask for more information on the new phone.

The telco is one happy company as the iPhone has been its bestselling smartphone, topping the charts each month since it hit the street in August last year. It carries no more inventory of the older 16GB iPhone as customers have cleared out its shelves.

But what of the pricing for the iPhone 3G S?

Contracts of the earliest SingTel iPhone customers are shy of a year. To get a new phone, they would have to break their contracts and pay full price for a new phone or they would have to add two extra years to the contract and pay a subsidised hardware fee. This may cause SingTel to lose a few customers.

Instead, I think customers will get to continue with their existing contracts but pay for the hardware. When the new phone was announced, the price was US$199 (S$289) and US$299 (S$433) for the 16GB and 32GB versions respectively.

I think SingTel will charge less than those prices, in the range of $150 to $350 for either of those two models.

The money is not in the device but the data revenue that SingTel will get. I, for example, have been accessing the Web more frequently from reading news to booking movie tickets since I’ve been using the iPhone. It’s a similar story with other iPhone users.

I’m waiting for Monday morning when SingTel announces the prices. But I’m 80% pretty sure that I’ll be getting one.

Grace Chng has been following Apple’s fortunes for more than two decades.