News iPhone flags in UK markets

[Tim S]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01...n_uk_markets/1

A UK tabloid has claimed that Apple is 'encouraging' UK retailers not to divulge sales figures for their flagship iPhone due to embarrassingly slow sales over the festive period.

[cjoyce1980]

with the nokia N95 why would you buy a iphone....

[Jamie]

Originally Posted by cjoyce1980

with the nokia N95 why would you buy a iphone....

The nokia is bigger and it's not also an iPod perhaps.

[Mankz]

Spell check over the photo tag!

[<A88>]

It's a combination of a lot of factors really- it's overpriced (I'd never pay more than £50 for a contract phone, and even that's pushing it) and doesn't really excel in anything other than web-browsing and perhaps music if you can cope with 8Gb of storage. People these days like 50gigapixel cameras and free gee, neither of which the iPhone has. It's an excellent device and has pushed competition up a notch with it, especially in the touchscreen arena, but to me it just ain't worth the cash with devices like the Orbit 2 coming out and doing a lot more for a lot less.

[Jordan Wise]

serves them right for being so greedy, its insulting to offer a phone with half the features of its rivals thats twice as expensive as them. Oh, oh, but isn't it pretty? Apple can go and stick their irritating lower case 'i's up their rear ends, where they belong

[Gordy]

Doesn't surprise me, its overpriced and under featured. I love apple products, and was last week needing a new mobile. However the iPhone was simply not an option. In the end I got a free phone and a contract that works out about £7.50 a month? The phone does everything the iPhone does and more at a fraction of the cost.

In the UK we have a far different phone system to the USA in terms of options / technology and choice. The iPhone is a hard sell here.

[Solidus]

A friend that works for carphone warehouse said when it was being released they had ordered 100 and expected a big que of people rushing to get one.

Come release day they sold 8 phones and they still have about 70-80 left and that was about 4-5months ago.

The phone itself i like very much, its features and ability to connect to the internet via wi-fi is cool but id like it to do it anywhere for free. The internet has become such a thing that everyone should be able to connect for free as standard i believe.

The phone is simply too expensive. Pay for the phone itself then pay £35 a month on a 18month contract that gives you 200minutes and 200 texts. Thats simply crazy = You cant give someone an amazing phone like that and then give them such a piss poor contract.

Apple is probably trying to milk as much money as it can before lowering the price to make it mainstream but the problem is if they hold out too long - The competition is going to get a good foothold and with everyone committed to other contracts they will probably shoot themselves in the foot.

I doubt they would but its a possibility if they dont start to lower the price. I myself am up for a upgrade soon as my contract is due to run out in a few months - I wonder what il be getting?

[pumpman]

I know before the Iphone came out, everyone I knew was humming to the mantra of get an N95 , and I got one and didn't like it, I swapped it for a special Iphone and liked it so much I got another one of contract for my daughter, the kids love them , they sit in the house and use the wifi, they play their music on the bus going to school and also use the phone when needed, its works for them and I liked the interface and the add ons, I did have a look at the viewty but wasn't so keen on it. When I consider I nearly paid £400 for the matrix phone a few years back , it didn't seem all that dear to me when you compare it to what the other phones cost, sure the minutes could be a bit more, but if you compare it to buying pc parts it doesn't feel so bad ie buy £300 gpu for it to half in value in a year same with cpu's e.t.c, all in all thumbs up here, and no I don't own a mac

[xrob]

i love seeing apple fail

[naokaji]

the iphone deserves to fail for its rip off price tag...
i mean seriously, 35£ every freaking month plus you have to pay for the phone? no thx.
why are there such insane expensive contracts? so they can suck you in with free phones, but if they dont give you the iphone for freee with those rip off contracts then that concept fails, so no wonder the iphone doesnt sell.

[Jordan Wise]

Originally Posted by pumpman

I nearly paid £400 for the matrix phone a few years back

yeah, but i all honesty, the matrix phone is still the coolest phone that exists. the iPhone doesn't even come close. I think there's far too much vanity in the products that apple sell, which probably isn't their fault but i see their products as i see designer clothes. They do exactly the same thing that far cheaper clothes do, but they still get sold because people are shallow, and that by investing in these 'fashionable' items that others recognise gives them 'status'. Which is a good thing for large businesses and their profit margins, but is bad for the smaller players trying to compete with their far superior products that will never sell as well because they can't afford the marketing costs.

[oasked]

Originally Posted by pumpman

I know before the Iphone came out, everyone I knew was humming to the mantra of get an N95 , and I got one and didn't like it, I swapped it for a special Iphone and liked it so much I got another one of contract for my daughter, the kids love them , they sit in the house and use the wifi, they play their music on the bus going to school and also use the phone when needed, its works for them and I liked the interface and the add ons, I did have a look at the viewty but wasn't so keen on it. When I consider I nearly paid £400 for the matrix phone a few years back , it didn't seem all that dear to me when you compare it to what the other phones cost, sure the minutes could be a bit more, but if you compare it to buying pc parts it doesn't feel so bad ie buy £300 gpu for it to half in value in a year same with cpu's e.t.c, all in all thumbs up here, and no I don't own a mac

You're crazy (and you must be loaded).

Its a nice PDA, but its missing key features for the European market and its also horrendously expensive. To me it seems like Apple are trying to fleece the European market as usual ($ = £ etc), but this time the market is too competitive for them to make much of an impact.

[DXR_13KE]

they did not expect the Spanish inqu...... i mean, they did not expect such competition, 3G comes as a standard on every phone sold here and 3.5G is starting to appear on almost every medium high range phone, they have equal or better functionalities than the iphone, the only thing that makes me think the iphone is nice is its multi touch screen and sleek user interface, but i can get the second with an HTC....

[Arkanrais]

F*** iPhone and ******************* apple.
maddox put it best about apple (well, the mac atleast)and the iPhone. {links contain mature content, swearing & whatnot}

[adam197]

Originally Posted by Arkanrais

F*** iPhone and ******************* apple.
maddox put it best about apple (well, the mac atleast)and the iPhone. {links contain mature content, swearing & whatnot}

Rofl, thats brilliant, and I'm 125 lb

I would happily pay £35 a month if I didn't have to pay for the phone in the first place. To me, the 'unlimited' data bumps the price up making it almost worth it, but 200 minutes and texts . I'm pretty sure O2 are partly to blame for this though. It's all just about making as much money out of it as possible while they (Apple and O2) can.

[Phil Rhodes]

The thing is failing for the same reason all the other cleverphones are failing - it's not really the handset, I can buy the handset in the US for a far more realistic price. It's the contract, and the only reason I don't have a 3G wireless dongle for my laptop is that the contract is so outrageously expensive.

I understand that with a little ingenuity it's possible to use an iphone handset on more or less any contract you care to name, though - anyone done this? Then you'd just be paying for the handset and whatever contract you have, plus, presumably, a lot of GPRS bandwidth.

But otherwise, it's the UK. What d'you expect?

[Spaceraver]

I have a HTC Touch and it does what it say on the tin and much more... I have installed navigation software, custom keys and so on... and it's nowhere near the price of the iPhone. so yeah... just to reiterate others... Cut the Bu*****t Apple...

[Nexxo]

Originally Posted by xrob

i love seeing apple fail

Originally Posted by Arkanrais

F*** iPhone and ******************* apple.
maddox put it best about apple (well, the mac atleast)and the iPhone. {links contain mature content, swearing & whatnot}

Thus spoke the masses.

Y'all forget that we have cool little items like the HTC Touch in part because there are companies like Apple moving the goalposts. Or do you think iRiver's new GSM phone would look the way it does if the iPhone didn't get there first? Do you think companies would bust their balls making better MP3 players if they didn't have the iPod to compete with? Do you think we had that popular Lian-Li V1000 series case before the aluminium Mac Pro tower came along? Do you think Windows XP and Vista would be so slick if OSX did not exist? You can moan about Apple's pricing and pretentions all you like, but they have the kind of vision that other companies are sorely lacking at the moment.

Hating Apple is just reverse fanboy-ism. An informed consumer keeps an open mind.

[Krikkit]

Well said Nexxo - there's nothing wrong with the iPhone per-sé imho, it's just very overpriced here, and we'd rather just get free phones from someone else than pay for it tbh.