Review: iPhone deals

It might be best to stay on hold for an iPhone deal, reports Adam Turner.

Apple's iPhone 3G has finally landed in Australia, but choosing which telco to buy it from can be a challenge.

Telstra, Optus and Vodafone are all selling the iPhone 3G. You can buy them from other stores, but you must sign up to one of these three networks. The 3 network is expected to offer the iPhone 3G in August. iPhone 3Gs are generally sold with a 12 or 24-month plan, although it is possible to buy a pre-paid iPhone 3G. It is, however, still locked to that network unless you download a hack from the internet or pay the telco yet another fee to have the phone "unlocked".

Like all smartphones, the iPhone 3G isn't cheap. Unfortunately the plans from the three networks are complicated, making it difficult to make direct comparisons. The iPhone is available with a choice of 8GB or 16GB of onboard storage.

While you're likely to have an idea of the monthly call and SMS allowance you require, choosing a data plan is more difficult. The data plan determines how much you can use the phone for checking email or surfing the web via the mobile phone network. If you go over your monthly allowance you'll get slugged with hefty excess data charges. Telstra and Vodafone didn't release full details of their iPhone 3G plans until less than a day before they went on sale.

The iPhone 3G's ease of use means you're more like to use the advanced features and chew through more data - especially because of the fast data speeds. The Google Maps feature is great for figuring out where you are, but downloading the maps uses data. It's also very easy to configure the iPhone 3G to check your email. The big screen and great web browser means you're more likely to use the internet while you're on the road. There's also a YouTube link on the iPhone's home screen, which can be a real data trap.

Even light users will struggle to keep their usage under 100MB a month. The iPhone offers the option of push email, which automatically forwards your email to the phone rather than waiting for you to check your inbox.

The iPhone 3G lets you connect to the internet via wifi, rather than the phone network, which is great when you're at home or near a public wifi hotspot as it doesn't count towards your monthly data limit. Unfortunately when the phone goes to sleep it disables its wifi adaptor to save power, which means it switches back to the expensive mobile phone network.

The iPhone 3G would chew through at least 5MB of data a month in the background, even before you use email or the web.

iPhone 3G owners using Optus and Vodafone won't get full 3G data speeds outside the cities.

The most dangerous thing about the iPhone 3G is that you can't disable the mobile data services. You can disable 3G, but this drops you back to 2G speeds rather than disabling mobile data completely.

If your phone is unlocked from your carrier, you might be able to disable data access in the advanced settings. If you change the APN setting to gibberish, you can still make calls and send SMS, but the phone can't access mobile data services. It's not elegant, but it works.

If your iPhone 3G is hacked to run applications that do not have Apple's blessing, a more elegant solution is to add a "DATA off" button to the menus. This can be done with applications such as services.app, iToggle and BossPrefs and - on our hacked first-generation iPhone - we got the best results from BossPrefs.

source : http://www.smh.com.au/