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RE[3]: Phones vs tablets
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*sigh* the reason for the meteoric growth in Europe is price. I can go out today and buy an Orange San Francisco (ZTE Blade) on PAYG (pay as you go) for about £110 (and therefore own it outright), bring it home, unlock it for free and put my current sim card in it. I can then root it, update it to 2.2 or 2.3 if I really want to. What is my cheapest iPhone option? 3GS, only for £99 I'm tied to a contract for at least 1 year. If I want a contract free one, I'm looking at double the cost.

Moreover, if I buy a phone of a contract in the UK, I still end up paying over £100 for an iPhone 4, unless I go on to a ridiculous tariff. An Android phone, depending on model, is almost always Free or less than £100 for the handset.

That is the real reason. Total cost of contract phones is cheap, and prepaid is peanuts compared to Apple. Most kids buy prepaid in the UK, so given the bling factor of needing a smartphone to look cool, you have your answer.

[citation needed]

When I look around, I see the expensive Android phones from HTC and Samsung all around me - no cheap phones AT ALL. These phones are often even MORE expensive than iPhones. In The Netherlands, you can get iPhones on whatever carrier you want, with whatever contract you want - yet Android is still growing far faster.

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RE[4]: Phones vs tablets
by linux-it on Thu 28th Jul 2011 18:23 in reply to "RE[3]: Phones vs tablets"
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RE[4]: Phones vs tablets
by henderson101 on Fri 29th Jul 2011 10:07 in reply to "RE[3]: Phones vs tablets"
henderson101 Member since:

[citation needed]

Depends on provider, but all you need to do is look at the Vodafone UK, Orange UK, T-Mobile UK and O2 UK sites. You can get a Galaxy 2S for LESS than an iPhone 4 on most sites, or at worst, the same cost. The iPhone 4 is, what, 9 months older design wise. So, basically, the iPhone 4 is still being sold at a PREMIUM price, where as the Android phones that came after it have dropped in price greatly. I'm not going to do your work for you. You're the part time journalist, I'm the Software Engineer.


But the Netherlands isn't seeing the same economic crunch that the UK and the US is, so that is not a fair comparison. Here, we see a lot of cheap Android phones and they sell well. I see countless people trawling the various discount phone stores we have (Phones4u, Carphone Warehouse, etc) as well as the vendor own shops (as most UK mobile providers have shops on the high street) as well as online sales (google "cheap UK phone") for the absolute best offer. We don't have the same Mobile phone culture in the UK as the rest of Europe, as most people have subsidised contract phones or fairly cheap pre paid.

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RE[5]: Phones vs tablets
by moochris on Fri 29th Jul 2011 18:33 in reply to "RE[4]: Phones vs tablets"
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