I had a conversation recently with some friends about the true cost of owning a smart phone.  I decided to run some numbers to see what the total cost of ownership really is across 5 of the more popular smart phones out there such as the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, Blackberry Storm, Android G1, and Palm Pre.

Here is a summary chart of what I found while shopping online:

As you can tell the monthly cost of ownership between the iPhone and the Storm are pretty close.  The G1 is your best cost saver across the board, except for when you get into the unlimited talk, text, and data.  Once you get to that tier, the Palm Pre comes through as the cheapest.

Now some basic disclaimers.  I tried to put some carrier specific disclaimers on each chart listed below.  These prices were effective on 7/20/2009.  When listing the price for the phone, I took into account what offers the carriers had running at the time, regardless of if it was a mail in rebate or instant rebate.  The prices do not include any state or federal taxes.  Finally, all of this is based on signing your life away to a 2 year contract as a new subscriber.

Here are the rest of the charts:

[View with PicLens]

AT&T posted a PDF that seems to answer common questions related to the new iPhone.  Two of the bigger questions has to do with how they are going to handle MMS and Tethering.  While the pdf mentions that MMS will be provided at no extra charge, they still don’t address tethering.  As I stated in a previous post though, I would expect tethering to cost an extra $30 a month.

AT&T Questions from our Customers

On Monday, Apple officially launched the new iPhone at the World Wide Developers Conference and to everyone’s surprise AT&T was absent from the list of providers who will support tethering and MMS. On Wednesday, AT&T was quoted all over the web saying that they would support MMS by the end of the summer as they are in the process of upgrading their networks to provide the best service possible to their customers.

As for tethering, that still seems to be up in the air, but people are beginning to speculate on what the real motive behind the delay is and people are curious if they are looking at charging extra for tethering and MMS.  My thoughts on this is that AT&T will charge extra for the tethering, but not for the MMS.  If you look at their existing plans for smart phones they have tethering and messaging options for those phones.  Tethering is an extra $30 and according to the details of the messaging, it includes MMS.

Here is a screen shot from the AT&T website:

ATT Features for tethering and MMS

If iPhone users are given an “iPhone Tax” for MMS, then AT&T and digging their grave even deeper with iPhone users.

What are your thoughts about an iPhone Tax?

Yesterday during the WWDC, Apple announced some new iPhone hardware.  During the keynote two new features were announced, MMS support and Internet tethering.  During the announcement, it was mentioned that AT&T would support these features later this summer.

After the keynote, AT&T announced the pricing and upgrade information for existing iPhone 3G customers.  Long story short, if you have owned your 3G iPhone for less than 18 months, it would cost you $399 for the new 16GB model and $499 for the 32GB model.  If you have had your phone for longer than 18 months, then you qualify for the $199/$299 pricing.

Based on various tweets and blog postings, people are pretty upset with AT&T.  I can understand being upset for not supporting MMS and tethering at launch, but I think people are overreacting to the upgrade policy.  When you got the iPhone 3G you signed a 2 year contract for that phone, so they are not required to let you out of your current contract just so that you can get the latest and greatest iPhone.  We can definitely thank phone subsidies for this as this is a pretty standard practice across the mobile industry.  When the Storm 2 comes out for Verizon, those customers are going to have to go through a similiar process if they want to get the newest version.

Could you imagine life without phone subsidies?  I sure wouldn’t want to?  Yes, I know we marry ourselves to a carrier for 2 years, but it gives us the option to own incredible “phones”.  I use the term “phones” losely because these days these phones are turning into mini super computers.  With this capability, comes a price that would prevent most consumers from ever even coming close to owning these devices.

So please, lets move past all the griping about AT&T and how they mis-treating loyal customers, and lets start focusing on the countdown to the new 3.0 OS that will give existing customers most of the new features that are part of the iPhone 3G S.

So now that all the new sexy hardware and software has been announced, we can now focus on what was not announced for the new iPhone 3GS:

Same Case/Body – The biggest thing that wasn’t announced for me was a redesign of the case.  I was really hoping that Apple would have moved to a soft back like the Storm has.  While I have already added my own case to provide that, it would be nice if it was built in

No glowing Apple logo – I am so glad this rumor is not true!  I could not imagine having something as silly as a glowing logo on my phone, and lets not even get started on how that would affect the battery.

No screen improvements – I was really looking forward to some improvements to the screen as this could have helped with some of the battery issues, but maybe they are holding this back for the next version

No color selection - No big loss here thanks to skins and cases, but I am sure some people would have liked to have the iPhone in various colors

No Verizon deal – Looks like we will have to continue to wait to see if the iPhone eventually lands with Verizon.  Based on what I have read so far today, there are a lot of Apple fans who are just flat out pissed with AT&T right now, so it will be interesting to see what happens here

No camera flash, or front facing camera – I have a feeling this will stay on the wish list for a lot.  I think we would see a front facing camera before a flash, but no one really knows

Adobe Flash support – I think for this one we can blame Adobe, but again we will have to wait and see.  The nice thing about this feature is they can add this through a software update.

Wireless N – Another nice to have and I assume this will be in the next revision.

What feature do you really wish they would have announced?